Yahoo! Develops Its Mobile App Suite To Appeal To The Crowd

The tech giant, Yahoo! (YHOO, Financial) has long been lagging behind Google (GOOG, Financial) in the mobile advertising market in terms of market share and user count. Lower user base than estimated in the mobile advertising business segment has been negatively affecting Yahoo!’s top and bottom lines for the past few quarters at a stretch. In fact, when CEO Marissa Mayer took over the management crown in July 2012, Yahoo!’s financial playbook was in a deplorable shape. She has indeed molded the company ever since she took over responsibilities as the Chief Executive Officer. To compete with chief rival Google, she has made apparent changes in the mobile applications business line by ramping up the mobile team from 50 to 500 employees and has refreshed several existing applications to gain better reviews and to pull the developer crowd.

Yahoo! has been working through a number of strategies to win more users for its mobile apps. And at its first mobile developer conference held in San Francisco on February 19, the company did debut a developer suite that could aid developers to build, analyze, advertise, distribute and make money from their apps. Let’s catch up with what got conveyed by the “mobile-first” company, something that Yahoo! boasts of being soon after it disclosed details on the ‘Mobile Development Suite’ at the conference.

Giving an edge to mobile developers

The focus at the developer conference was the set of five services that were unveiled by Yahoo! to offer enormous leverage to mobile app developers to improve their apps. The services have been designed through the joint efforts of Yahoo!, Flurry Inc. and BrightRoll. Flurry, the analytics firm, was acquired by parent company Yahoo! in August last year, while video adtech startup BrightRoll joined the company lately in December last year.

The five services that have been developed by using the technology and expertise of the three companies are- Flurry Analytics Explorer, Flurry Pulse, Yahoo! App Publishing, Yahoo! Search in Apps and Yahoo! App Marketing.

The first two tools were bought from the analytics firm that joined the reigns of Yahoo! in August 2014. The first service is likely to support complex queries of developers offering better insight into their app’s performance. Thereafter, using the Flurry Pulse tool, developers would be able to easily share the information derived from Analytics Explorer with their business partners.

Yahoo! strongly believes that its third service, Yahoo! App Publishing, will be highly appreciated by developers as it serves as a monetization tool by posting native, video and display ads through Yahoo!’s Gemini, BrightRoll and Flurry tools available in the suite. Additionally, the Yahoo! Search feature would allow developers “enhance the user experience” and “create additional monetization channels.” Finally, the App marketing platform would aid in reaching out to the user base and acquiring new users across Yahoo’s desktop services, mobile apps and Tumblr social network.

Offering direct competition to immediate rivals

Since the new Yahoo platform provides free analytics and money making tools to entice developers towards its advertising products, it in turn would offer competition to immediate rivals such as Twitter (TWTR, Financial) and Facebook (FB, Financial) which also provide such tools to mobile app developers. Now it’s up to the developers’ to choose from the list of available options. And the selection could hugely depend upon the user reach offered by each platform, payments that could be generated on the platform by hosting ads and on the analytical skill of the platform that could possibly provide the best understanding to the developer as to what’s going on with his developed app through analytics.

CEO, Marissa Mayer, remains optimistic on the future opportunities for Yahoo’s Mobile Development Suite and commented during the conference – “What we see the most demand for is around identifying users across platforms. Some of the cookie matching we’re working with comScore on.”

Speaking on rivals in the advertising domain, Facebook and Google have always been ahead of Yahoo till date, but the CEO expects to spin the wheel in a different direction with these developer tools which could possibly aid in reducing the gap of Yahoo with the other two contenders. Though the tech giant is neither the top search engine nor the most popular social networking site available for users, it does understand the user’s interest areas and looks ahead to develop tools to nurture such interests in the long run.

Final word

There is a lot more to know as to how developers react to this platform being launched by Yahoo and whether it’s able to break the duopoly built by Google and Facebook in the mobile advertising domain in the years to come. Let’s stay tuned and keep watching how the "Mobile Development suite" performs in the market and whether it serves as a weapon for Yahoo to reach out to most of the mobile developers and allure them to make it their preferred platform in the long run.