Posts tagged revenues

Yahoo! is coming back to life with display ads up 26%

Jan 27th

Posted by Melinda Varley in RSS Feed

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Yahoo!, the search engine that we all thought would pack it in just one year ago, has emerged from 2009 victorious with revenues up 10%. How did it come back from the brink?

Yahoo! has reported its fifth straight quarter of falling revenue, but the world’s third most popular search engine did see profits rise as the online advertising market began to show signs of life.

Revenue from display ads such as banners, which are core to Yahoo’s business, climbed 26% over the previous quarter. Online search ads, ticked up 4% – the first increase since the third quarter of 2008.

The results were far from Google’s 17% jump in revenue and a more than 400 percent surge in profits last week. However, Yahoo!’s income is up totaling £93 million, up from a £187 million loss in 2008.

Fourth-quarter revenue was £1 billion, down 4% from a year ago, but up 10% from the previous quarter.

Carol Bartz, the ambitious CEO of Yahoo who took the reins exactly one year ago implemented a wide-ranging company restructure, said that she was now confident about the state of the online ad business.  

She said, “Overall, things seem to be returning to a more normal state in the online ad business. These results are not just the result of an improving economic climate. These are the direct result of hard work that culminated in Q4 and will continue into 2010.”

But Yahoo!’s problems predate the economic downturn and online advertising rut. The company has been bleeding traffic to Google and social networking sites such as Facebook and continues to do so.

In December, Yahoo held 17.3% of the search market in the US, down 0.2% from the previous month, according to comScore’s latest figures. Google and Microsoft’s Bing search tool both continue to gain share, controlling 65.7% and 10.7%, respectively.

Bartz has received praise in light of the latest earnings figures, with some observers hailing her $100 million branding campaign that launched last year a massive success. She has also been accredited with the successful deal to outsource Yahoo’s core search engine technology to Microsoft.

Bartz added, “The fourth quarter marked a strong finish to 2009, which was a transformative year for Yahoo!. Our business has positive momentum and we feel good as we head into 2010.”

Also over the past quarter, Yahoo! launched Ad Interest Manager, which aims to take transparency in online advertising to a new level by providing significantly greater control over users’ interactions with interest-based advertising to improve personal relevance and build trust.

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Google’s Living Stories: free SEO, but no ad dollars

Dec 10th

Posted by Melinda Varley in RSS Feed

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Will news survive in the digital era? Google says yes, and has launched ‘Living Stories’ to prove that it isn’t the news industry’s enemy, but its friend.

The ‘to pay or not to pay’ for news content debate may rage on but what’s most exciting about this is that it makes online news a more appealing – and more commercially valuable commodity – that publishers could charge for.

Google says that what has often been overlooked in the ongoing debate about the future of news is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it is read online.

On its blog, Google said, “We believe it’s just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways — ways that simply aren’t possible offline.”

Living Stories, in partnership with The News York Times and The Washington Post, is being tested through Google Labs and features new ways to interact with news online. (For more info read our news story here).

Living Stories takes a different approach to the way that news is traditionally presented and read,  playing to certain unique advantages of online publishing. It unifies coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL and organizes information by developments in the story.

The software also knows where a user has clicked before by turning those stories a different shade of blue. “Living Stories automatically tracks user interactions with the story, helping users get the latest updates to the stories they’re following and sift through the coverage in novel ways,” says its blog.

Andreas Pouros, chief operating officer at search marketing agency Greenlight, believes that Google has essentially found a way to try and bring publishers on-side by offering them free SEO, and what in his view, would appear to be a win-win situation for all involved.

“This marks a significant collaboration between Google and some major heavyweights in the publishing industry,” he says. 

But of course only time will tell of which approach will gain the most traction.

Money, honey?

Google thinks Living Stories can help newspapers adapt to a shift that is causing millions of people to get their news from online sources instead of print. But that’s a huge problem for newspapers because they make most of their money from ads appearing in print.

Even though the Living Stories page design follows the usual Google template – simple layout, plenty of white space for potential online advertising – the search engine giant has no plans to show ads during the experiment.

Is there anything besides ad placement in Living Stories that could open up a new revenue stream for money-starved media outlets? Not as far as we can see. Will Living Stories be a viable solution to save the media industry? I am thinking ‘no’.

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