Yahoo Broadens Mobile Ads Search Service In Asia
Singapore – Internet media firm Yahoo pushing to consolidate its position in mobile advertising and search on Tuesday announced a series of new deals with six telecom companies in eight Asian countries and territories.
Yahoo is expanding the availability of its mobile services in a number of directions with “Yahoo Go 3.0” launches intended for Australia, India, and Southeast Asia, as well as oneSearch partnerships with an assortment of mobile operators.
It now has 60 such partnerships worldwide, including with Mahanagar Telephon Nigam (MTNL) in India, Hong CSL Limited, Smart Communications and Digital Mobile Phlis (Sun Cellular) in the Philippines and Vibo Telecom in Taiwan. “We are now able to reach 600 million subscribers,” David Ko, Asia managing director and vice president of Yahoo’s mobile division, told reporters at a media briefing.
“This creates the scale to make mobile advertising attractive.”
By default, all carriers will offer oneSearch yahoo-adds-voice-commands-to-web-search-on-phones Apr-2-2008 with their respective mobile Web portals.
The company’s oneSearch will become the featured search technology on the mobile Internet search pages of service providers MTNL in India; CSL in Hong Kong; Smart and Sun Cellular in the Philippines; and Vibo in Taiwan.
Yahoo is also providing domestic versions of its Go 3.0 voice search technology in India, Southeast Asia and Australia, with localization features including a Bahasa Indonesia version for that country, and one designed to recognize various regional English accents.
Yahoo’s Asian expansion is one that will likely prove a significant advantage for the company as far as its mobile strategy is concerned, particularly in the realm of search.
The company has also forged two strategic mobile advertising partnerships with Idea Cellular Ltd. in India and Maxis Communications Bhd (Malaysia), the company said in a statement. Both will carry display advertising, which will be sold and served by Yahoo.
“Financial terms of these and the other deals were not disclosed.”
The company further announced the launch of new mobile widgets for the Asia Pacific region including Yahoo! Cricket, Yahoo! Answers and Showtimes (Yahoo! India Movies), as well as a MTV Asia mobile widget featuring news updates and music charts.
While Yahoo trails Google in the search space on the desktop, its mobile offerings have shown to be especially active and have been reviewed rather favorably as of late. And seeing as how the Asian technology market is one that still appears on a strong growth trend, Yahoo is likely starting to carve its share with its newest products at the right time, when mobile subscribers are looking to do much more with their handsets than simply place calls and converse via SMS.
Asia is home to the world’s largest number of mobile users with over 1.16 billion GSM (Global Standard for Mobile communications) connections alone, according to the GSM Association’s for the fourth quarter of 2007. China and India combine for almost 800 million, with Japan, Indonesia, and Pakistan adding about another 250 million.
Ko said the mobile advertising market is expected to rise to $16.2 billion (8.2 billion pounds) in 2011 up from $1.5 billion in 2006 and that Yahoo “would obviously love to take a large chunk of that pie”.
The announcements came on the first day of CommunicAsia in Singapore, one of the region’s most important telecommunications shows. CommunicAsia runs through Friday.