SUNNYVALE, Calif.—Yahoo Inc. stepped further into the white-hot mobile marketing arena, launching a “graphical advertising platform” for its wireless service.
The company outlined a platform that supports interactive ads that users can click on to access more information or place a direct call to an advertiser. The move follows last month’s move by Yahoo to extend its search ad technology to wireless, returning paid messages with mobile search results.
The first graphical ads are slated to go live later this week, the company said.
Yahoo is hoping to leverage its early traction in wireless against Google Inc., which has gained ground on its Internet rival in recent months. Yahoo last month reported a 38-percent decline in quarterly profit and issued a meager outlook for the rest of the year, while Google’s quarterly profit nearly doubled as revenues rose 70 percent. Google’s market value has climbed roughly 15 percent this year while shares of Yahoo have slipped more than 30 percent.
Although Yahoo has been slipping among computer users, it continues to draw impressive traffic among wireless consumers in the early days of the mobile Internet. According to M:Metrics, Yahoo’s mobile news offerings drew 3.7 million users during the third quarter—nearly matching top-performing CNN—and more than 3 million users accessed the company’s weather information, second only to The Weather Channel.
Google Inc. maintains a slight edge in mobile search traffic, though, drawing 5.2 million users during that period. Yahoo finished second among wireless search providers with 4.3 million wireless Web surfers.
Network operators and content providers are increasingly looking to advertising revenues to fuel growth of mobile data. A recent report from mobile technology developer Amobee Media Systems indicates that ad revenues “can be worth as much as four times the equivalent download value” as users are far more likely to accept free, ad-supported content than to pay for such offerings.
“There’s a limit to how much we can expect consumers to continuously increase their spend on new content services,” said Eden Zoller, a principal analyst with Ovum’s consumer practice. “(Ad-supported content) has the potential to impact the growth of data ARPU, which is critical in markets where voice ARPU is declining.”
