IT sector news
Yahoo web portal goes live
1/10/2009Internet giant Yahoo has relaunched its web portal in a move to grow traffic and revenues. While Yahoo is the world's most popular website, it has so far not matched this dominance in financial terms. This latest move is being championed by new chief executive Carol Bartz, who replaced co-founder Jerry Yang in January.
The value of a portal is debated by commentators, with most web users now using search engines to pinpoint information rather than being shepherded through a portal. Yahoo argues that most of its customers still go to the portal first, which means that frontpage advertising is still worth paying for. Indeed frontpage global adverts can cost thousands if not millions of dollars a day.
Yahoo has quoted surveys that suggest that 60% of Yahoo users in the UK want a one-stop shop to organise their life on the internet. Yahoo is opening its home page to rivals so that users will be able to integrated third-party web services like Hotmail or Facebook into the portal. The aim is to keep the portal at the centre of each customer's web experience.
The new portal also has an unprecedented number of links to non-Yahoo websites, potentially taking traffic away from Yahoo's own sprawling network of sites and services. In the UK the Yahoo portal features top news headlines from the Telegraph, Guardian and Daily Mail. Yahoo is getting a share of the advertising revenue generated by this traffic to partners.
