After trying just about everything to convince consumers and shareholders alike that its still relevant, Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) is embarking on yet another venture in the world of social media. Described as a “personalized content initiative” in recent report at the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, Yahoo!’s new plan to woo Web users back to its suite of services involves providing a wealth of personalized apps and content on mobile devices.
Yahoo has yet to comment on reports, but sources “familiar with the matter” say that CEO Carol Bartz is expected to officially unveil the initiative during the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona next week.
The new features will be broadly similar to services already offered by Yahoo!, not to mention its many competitors. The new apps will cull information from Yahoo! users and then custom build a version of Yahoo.com for them when they access it on their smartphone, not unlike the now decade-old “Recommendations” tool at the Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) online store. The example given is a Yahoo! fantasy football user will be presented with a greater variety of sports content when they access their Yahoo! homepage.
This type of hands-off personalization is, at least on paper, different from Yahoo!’s greatest competitor — both on the Web and on connected devices. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has multiple services from news to email are better known for contextually targeting customers with advertising at the same time as offering deep customizability. At this early stage before the new initiative has been clearly defined, it seems that Yahoo! is banking on users wanting to put less effort into customizing their media and account services on mobile devices.
The initiative’s success depends on many factors, among them how effective the personalization is in practice and how well integrated the apps are across Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM), Google Android, and other mobile devices. Those problems, of course, pale in comparison to the issue of convincing non-Yahoo! users to switch from competing services in the first place.
If nothing else, Yahoo! shareholders should take comfort in the fact that this is the sort of initiative Carol Bartz is pursuing. Since taking over as CEO in 2009, Bartz has repeatedly stressed the need for Yahoo! to find a single identity for itself after years of sprawling into many disparate, unpopular web services. Over the past twelve months, the company has flailed about trying to rehabilitate itself. A new web portal for Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) failed to raise declining advertising revenue while integration of Facebook Connect and Twitter into Yahoo!’s account pages last summer was met with broad indifference from users. Just last month, Yahoo! also announced that it was bolstering its still-developing Yahoo! Connected TV Internet television business with a new Disney (NYSE: DIS) partnership. TVs and set top boxes with Yahoo!’s software will be getting new “widgets” with exclusive content from Disney owned channels like ABC, ESPN, and the Disney Channel.
The personalized content initiative is at least inline with the sorts of services that made Yahoo! so successful in the late ’90s and early ’00s, but unfortunately those services are provided by more popular, not to mention more competent, businesses. Regardless of the details that emerge at the Mobile World Conference next week, it’s unlikely that personalized mobile content will improve Yahoo!’s future.
As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
