The tech giant unveiled its new Yahoo Mobile Development Suite that combines Yahoo App Publishing for monetization, Search In
Apps, and App Marketing with its Flurry Analytics acquisition made last
year. This is Yahoo’s “ads in dev’s clothing” strategy to convince app makers
to buy and host its ads.
Flurry now has
200,000 app developers on its platform who have built 630,000 apps that reach
1.6 billion devices. Yahoo meanwhile now has 575 million monthly mobile
visitors to its properties and hit $1.2 billion in mobile revenue in 2014, as
it predicted.
“Today is about
building innovative, game-changing applications,” said CEO Marissa Mayer
when she took the stage. Now, rather than just make them itself, Yahoo is
providing the tools for developers to build, grow, and earn money on their own
apps.
Mobile
Trends
Following Mayer,
Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf took the stage to give an update on the state of
mobile. He says there are three big trends in mobile right now:
1. A massive rise in
mobile shopping
2. Messaging apps
becoming whole platforms, like We Chat’s taxi integration, Line’s games, and
Snapchat’s new Snapcash payment feature that prove people want more services
from their favorite apps
3. Phablet phones
driving a massive increase in media consumption
Mobile Developer Suite
Each piece of the
Yahoo Mobile Development Suite is getting its own update as well as being tied
together.
Flurry
Explorer And Pulse
Flurry announced the
new Flurry Explorer analytics
tool, which an exec said is an “ad-hoc query analysis tool” that lets you
“ask complex questions of your data and get the answer in seconds.” The product
is free at any scale, which poises it to undercut Mixpanel, and analytics tool
favorite around the industry that unfortunately can be quite expensive
depending on how many in-app events are being measured.
Flurry is also
launching Flurry Pulse, which
lets developers securely share any of their data with their partners with ease.
No additional code needs to be written. For example, mobile app publishers
serving ads can send their mobile audience data directly to comScore (a Flurry
Pulse launch partner).
Previously,
developers would have had to integrate another comScore SDK into their apps.
This shrinks app size, increases app stability thanks to minimizing code,
and removes the need for extra updates. Yahoo plans to add additional partners
to Flurry Pulse soon, and is now in developer preview and will roll out over
the coming weeks and months.
Monetizing
With Ads
To give mobile
developers a better way to monetize, Yahoo today launched Yahoo App Publishing.
Now through the
Flurry SDK, developers can integrate Yahoo’s
Gemini native ads that fit into
different app feeds, whether they’re vertical streams, or horizontal cards. No
matter what an app looks like, Yahoo’s Gemini system can morph standard ads to
match the app’s design.
Last year Yahoo
acquired video adtech startup BrightRoll. Now developers can pipe Brigh tRoll
ads into their apps through the Flurry SDK. So if an app features video
content, they can easily monetize it without their own sales force through
BrightRoll. “Isn’t this great? Grumpy Cat and Big Macs in your app, and
you make money from it,” said BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti.
Yahoo
Search In Apps
Developers don’t
want users bouncing from their apps when they need to run a web search. So
today Yahoo launched Yahoo Search
In Apps, an integratable search tool for mobile apps. The idea is that not only
will users stick around in a developer’s app if they can search from there, but
the developer can share in the ad revenue if users click on search ads.
Yahoo Search In Apps
is now integrated in Yahoo’s main app, Yahoo News Digest, Yahoo Mail and
Android launcher Yahoo Aviate. Externally, the Dodol launcher and Solo launcher
apps now integrate Yahoo Search In Apps. Yahoo’s Jon Paris gave the example of
someone using news app and wanting to learn more about the topic of the
article. Yahoo lets them search without exiting the app.
Yahoo
Mobile Marketing
Yahoo is tying together its three mobile advertising options
for developers: Gemini native ads on Yahoo’s properties,
video ads on third parties, and Sponsored Post social ads on Tumblr. Now
developers can target ads in any of these channels using Yahoo’s identity data
with a self-serve tool. That includes what people browse on Yahoo and Tumblr,
and what they do across the web thanks to Flurry’s big footprint.
The
Virtuous Cycle
Overall, Yahoo’s platform is a smart play because it dangles
free analytics and monetization tools to lure developers towards its
advertising products. Investors gave Yahoo a small 1.42 percent bump today as
of 3:15 p.m. EST thanks to the launches. This “PlADform Strategy” is what I wrote
Facebook and Twitter were aggressively developing last year.
