Following missives from Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple over the past 72 hours, Yahoo issued its own disclosure statement last night about law-enforcement data requests. Signed by CEO Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell, the statement said that there had been "between 12,000 and 13,000" data requests during the past six months: We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it. To that end, we are disclosing the total number of requests for user data that law enforcement agencies in the U.S. made to us between December 1, 2012 and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Legal | Legal: PRISM | Legal: Privacy | Yahoo | Yahoo: Business Issues

Did you know Yahoo scans email to do contextual ad targeting similar to the way Google does for Gmail? That wasn't on my radar, but it is now, as the company is ending older versions of Yahoo Mail and forcing everyone to use the latest version, where terms of service allow for this type of targeting. Yahoo's Terms Allow Email Scan & Targeting The folks at rival StartMail (which is not yet live) sent up the red flag. We got an email highlighting the change. From StartMail's release: As of June 1, all Yahoo email users are required to upgrade to the company's newest platform, which allow [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Email Marketing | Features & Analysis | Google: Gmail | Microsoft: Outlook | Top News | Yahoo: Mail

Apple is once again listed as the most valuable brand on earth, while Google inched closer to the top spot and Microsoft fell out of the top five in the 2013 Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands. This is the eighth year that Brandz has compiled its list, which comes from research involving two million consumers and more than 10,000 brands, the company says. Apple tops the list again this year, with Google moving up from third place to second. Microsoft was ranked fifth last year, but fell to seventh this time around. IBM, at No. 3, is the fourth technology company in the top 10. [...]

Related Topics: Amazon | Apple | Branding | Channel: Industry | eBay | Facebook | Google | Microsoft | Samsung | Top News | Yahoo

It looks like there's something more to today's series of Flickr announcements than just bigger images, more storage and a shiny, new design: Yahoo really wants to show more ads. As you probably heard, Flickr has upped its base storage for all users to an astonishing one terabyte of data. And that's free. No charge. Zip. Gratis. It's a dramatic change to Flickr's previous account tiers. Before today, Flickr Pro accounts ran about $25 per year and included several benefits that Free accounts didn't have: unlimited photo and video uploads unlimited storage unlimited bandwidth [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Features & Analysis | Yahoo | Yahoo: Advertising | Yahoo: Flickr

Yahoo followed up its acquisition of Tumblr today with a relaunch of a "better, brighter Flickr" at a press conference in New York City. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said she challenged the Flickr team to "make Flickr awesome again." The new Flickr puts photos first. Acknowledging that Flickr had become a mishmash of small thumbnails, links and words, today's launch showcases the new approach to an immersive photo experience. "We want all your photos" Adam Cahan, SVP of mobile and emerging products at Yahoo announced that all photos are full resolution and each user will have a free tera [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Internet Marketing Industry: Acquisitions | Top News | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Flickr

On a conference call to discuss Yahoo's exceptional $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer's admiration for Tumblr's achievements and culture was refreshingly transparent. Tumblr will continue to operate independently, David Karp will remain CEO, and Yahoo has promised "not to screw it up." Tumblr has more than 300 million monthly users and is signing up 120,000 new users per day. The deal is expected to increase Yahoo's total audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly users. Traffic could grow by 20%. In the press release, David Karp, CEO of Tumblr, addressed [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Internet Marketing Industry: Acquisitions | Top News | Tumblr | Yahoo: Business Issues

The Yahoo!/Tumblr talk may be the biggest element of today's Yahoo! press event, but that's not all that will be announced according to Bloomberg. The once wildly-popular photo-sharing site Flickr will be updated, according to the report. Flickr has taken a backseat to other social sites like  Instagram, Facebook, Twitter & Imgur, but still has more than 80 million monthly users. Upon arrival, of new CEO Marissa Mayer, Flickr was actually dropped from the Yahoo! homepage during an initial re-design. When Mayer took the reins, the Flickr community was abuzz and pleaded with Yahoo! [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Yahoo | Yahoo: Flickr

AllThingsD reports the anticipated Tumblr acquisition was approved by Yahoo's board today for the amount of $1.1 billion. Kara Swisher from AllThingsD said the deal was a "foregone conclusion and was an unanimous vote" by Yahoo's board. They plan to announce the deal tomorrow, Monday, morning. This will be Marissa Mayer's largest acquisition as the CEO of Yahoo. It appears Tumblr will remain as a standalone brand, similar to the Flickr brand. The Wall Street Journal adds that it is not clear if the Tumblr board has approved the deal as of yet. Tumblr was founded in 2007 as a microb [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Top News | Tumblr | Yahoo: Business Issues

Yahoo announced yesterday that it had prevailed in an appeal of a $2.75 judgment in Mexico obtained by former joint venture partners: The appellate decision overturned all monetary awards against Yahoo! Inc. and reduced the monetary award against Yahoo! Mexico to $172,500. Yahoo! Mexico was awarded $2.6 million in the original judgment, and this award was confirmed by the appellate decision. The plaintiffs may appeal this decision. The litigation began in November 2011. Plaintiffs were Worldwide Directories and Ideas Interactivas. The case arose from the termination of a joint venture agreem [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Yahoo | Yahoo: Business Issues

Yahoo is trying to buy social blogging platform Tumblr for $1 billion (or more). That would represent about a third of the company's existing cash -- though it stands to make more cash from its remaining Alibaba stake. It's a big bet and the type of high-impact acquisition that Marissa Mayer has wanted to make since becoming CEO of Yahoo. Why buy Tumblr? The reasons are almost self-evident. Yahoo is a media/content company whose primary revenue source is display advertising. Tumblr is a massive user-generated content machine with a huge audience and page views (read: inventory). It's a t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Features & Analysis | Top News | Tumblr | Yahoo | Yahoo: Business Issues

Yahoo announced a partnership with Twitter today to include real-time tweets from media outlets, politicians and celebrities in the Yahoo homepage newsfeed. In a post titled "@yahoo delivers #bestoftheweb," Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said users will see "relevant and personalized Tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and other sources." Users will be able to follow tweet sources by clicking on the "Follow" button displayed in the tweets. It is not yet clear how the tweet personalization will function, but one would think that users who are signed in to Yahoo and or Twitter will be served mor [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Twitter | Twitter: Business Issues | Yahoo | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: News

Advertisers using the Yahoo!Bing Ad Network received a number of updates in April, including new search and filter options, search query reports that include stop words and special characters, and updated ad appeal rules with new appeal status designations to avoid confusion on whether or not an appealed ad is active. Bing Ads has also added a Competition column that scores keywords by their competitive value. While the Keyword Suggestions feature received a limited release in September 2012, one final Bing Ads update was the expansion of Keywords Suggestions to UK advertisers. For more [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Microsoft: Bing | Yahoo

Microsoft has effectively renewed its search vows with Yahoo a second time, pledging once again that Yahoo will indeed earn a high "revenue per search" that was promised back when the alliance was made in 2009. That's not going to happen. When the latest extension expires in a year, the expected RPS still won't be reached. Microsoft will either renew again or Yahoo will walk away, if it can. All About RPS Yahoo Extends Microsoft Search Deal & Revenue Guarantees is our story on Search Engine Land today that covers how Microsoft is extending a part of its deal with Yahoo about "revenue pe [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Features & Analysis | Internet Marketing Industry | Microsoft: Business Issues | Top News | Yahoo: Business Issues

After launching the new Yahoo news stream experience in February, the company announced their newest advertising format today, Yahoo Stream Ads. Designed to offer an unobtrusive advertising experience, the stream ads are labeled by Yahoo as the "sponsored twin" to news feed articles, meant to deliver personalized content to users. As a user performs more searches on Yahoo and engages with more content, their news feed becomes intuitive to their personal preferences. Along with Yahoo's news stream, Yahoo Stream Ads have been developed to deliver the same relevant content within the user's ne [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Yahoo | Yahoo: News

Yahoo's unique video viewers rose to 50.3 million, up from 43.6 million in February, bumping the company up a rung to the  number four U.S. Online Video Content Property according to comScore's March 2013 US Online Video Rankings, In March, the number of Americans watching online content videos rose 2.5% from February. Nearly 182.5 million Americans watched 39.3 billion online content videos. Ad video views hit an all-time high at 13.2 billion, up from 9.9 billion in February. Yahoo moved up a rung to number four and closed in on VEVO this month. (It will be interesting to watch what impac [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Facebook: Statistics | Google: YouTube | Statistics: Market Share | Yahoo

Yahoo introduced its new iOS app today, noting that the technology used to build the app was possible because of their recent acquisition of Summly. "The new Yahoo mobile app is also smarter, using Summly's natural-language algorithms and machine learning to deliver quick story summaries," said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in a post on Yahoo's corporate blog. Yahoo gained a number of headlines when it acquired Summly less than a month ago for approximately $30 million. Most of the attention was garnered because the startup was founded by a 17 year old who based his technology on a licensing arra [...]

Related Topics: Apple: iOS | Channel: Mobile Marketing | Top News | Yahoo: Mobile

Yahoo announced today that it is retiring five of its products at the end of this month, including Upcoming, Yahoo Kids and Yahoo Deals. Older versions of Yahoo Mail will be disabled as well on June 3. In an attempt to narrow their focus, Yahoo stated they wanted to put their energy into building "beautiful products," citing Yahoo Mail for iPad and Android tablets, and Yahoo Weather for iPhone, which were both introduced this week. Upcoming, Yahoo's events and calendar tool, will be cease to exist as of April 30, 2013, along with its API support. Other products scheduled to retire this m [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content Marketing | Yahoo | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Mobile | Yahoo: News

Several notable names from the search/social/marketing industries are included on the 2013 Time 100, the magazine's annual attempt to list the most influential people in the world. There's no ranking involved -- it's not a countdown, just a collection of movers and shakers grouped together in categories like "pioneers," "titans" or "leaders." And each person on the list gets a brief essay written by a guest author -- often also someone quite influential in his/her own right. Of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, her former boss at Google, Eric Schmidt, says "when I think back to our time working t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook | Facebook: Instagram | Internet Marketing Industry | Yahoo

This morning, Yahoo introduced its improved Mail app for Apple and Android tablets and a new weather app for the iPhone. The Mail app is a larger, tablet-optimized version of the Mail app that was introduced for the iPhone in December. Yahoo's new mail apps put Yahoo Mail's quality and functionality on par with Google's mail apps and will help increase mobile usage and retain Yahoo Mail users. The weather app, however, is not just "workmanlike" but offers a visually rich environment and should grow usage on the iPhone. The Android version of Yahoo Weather is similarly immersive, but not [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Yahoo | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Flickr | Yahoo: Mobile

Usage of Yahoo's various mobile apps was up about 50 percent in the first quarter of the year to more than 300 million monthly users. That's some of the mobile-related data that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer shared today on the company's Q1 earnings call. During the company's previous earnings call three months ago, Mayer said that Yahoo ended 2012 with about 200 million monthly mobile users. She called out growth in two specific Yahoo mobile apps -- Mail and Flickr -- that were relaunched right before Christmas. On Yahoo's new mobile Mail app, daily active users were up 50 percent in the firs [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Yahoo | Yahoo: Mobile