Yahoo put a lot of effort and investment toward presenting a new Yahoo to the world in 2013, with much of it hinged on improving its mobile business. There have been significant updates to old apps; over a dozen mobile-related acquisitions (out of a total of 28) to pick up talent, technology and products; and tests for what Yahoo should focus on next.
But even as it has managed to grow itsmobile audience this year, Yahoo is exiting 2013 on something of a low note: not one of its apps is in the top 100 iTunes App store.
As a point of comparison, consider how others are faring in Apple’s top 100: Google has five apps (Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube and Chrome). Facebook has three (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram). Twitter has two (Twitter and Vine). And a number of companies like Microsoft (Skype), Netflix, Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, Snapchat, Uber — “even fucking Groupon,” as one observer noted to us — have one apiece.
(Tumblr, acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion and with its own recent update, also failed to make the cut. According to Appanie, it’s currently at No. 110.)
Comscore, according to its October 2013 figures, notes that Yahoo is the third most-popular property behind Google and Facebook on smartphones, with a reach of nearly 78 percent, some 11 percentage points behind number-one Google. Yahoo has managed to hold on to that No. 3 spot for a while now, although its reach has declined compared to the previous few months (egSeptember: 82.2 percent reach; August: 83.2 percent).
Although Yahoo has long been making efforts to streamline its presence on mobile, Yahoo currently has 15 apps in the U.S. App Store (16 if you count Tumblr).
Instead, the analyst firm’s most recent figures note that Yahoo Stocks (a widget perhaps, since there is no standalone app by that name, unless comScore means Yahoo Finance), and Yahoo’s Weather Widget (not app) are the company’s most popular smartphone apps at the moment, respectively ranking 9th and 11th, with reaches of 29.9 percent and 23.6 percent. They are separated by Instagram, which has a reach of 25.5 percent.
This should serve as a reminder that installed usage may not always correlate to downloads. But it also muddles something worth remembering: by virtue of real estate and time spent on property, monetizing something like Snapchat or Instagram is likely to be a whole lot bigger of an opportunity than monetizing a weather widget.
In November 2013, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer said the company had 400millionmonthlyactiveusersonmobile , compared to the 390 million the company noted a month before, and the 350 million Mayer noted during the TC Disrupt conference in September. This points to an audience that continues to increase, if slowly.
Can Yahoo sustain that growth with its current mobile portfolio, and is it enough to translate to wider financial success for the company? Mayer has said in the past that getting to where Yahoo would like to be could take another three to four years.
The issue, therefore, is whether its lack of blockbuster popularity so far is simply a premature red herring, or a sign of more lacklustre things to come.
Source: Techcrunch
Source: Techcrunch
