Yahoo will put social gaming leader Zynga’s Farmville and other distractions on its pages as it tries to revive flagging user engagement and generate more ad revenue, chief executive Carol Bartz said Wednesday.
At a conference for investors and analysts at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, Ms Bartz and other executive said they were concerned about the drop in minutes spent on Yahoo pages per user, but promised an array of fixes.The formula includes alliances with content providers like Zynga, which has built a massive user base on top of the Facebook platform. Lack of engagement with Yahoo’s email service has dragged down the overall figures, Ms Bartz said, and a new interface and better integration of photos and other functions will help there.
Even though search revenue is expected to drop in the near term, Yahoo executives said they could get between 7 and 10 per cent of compound annual revenue growth through 2013, largely through an expected surge in display ads.
Yahoo said the integration of its paid and nonpaid search results with Microsoft was on track. It is working hard to customise more Yahoo content based on user preferences.
Adding new material based on location is significantly increasing time spent on the pages, Ms Bartz said, citing the recently announced acquisition of blogging network Associated Content as the sort of modest purchase that will drive greater engagement.
Investors were less than overwhelmed, as Yahoo shares moved little. In Silicon Valley at least, far more attention was being paid to changes in Facebook’s privacy policies–a pretty good indicator of where the engagement is these days.
