Yahoo may be in the midst of a troubled situation, but it has never stopped innovating to improve the situation. This update notices that Yahoo is deepening its connections with Facebook’s online social network. The news broke late Tuesday, when the recently partnered companies announced that they will allow Facebook users to share more of their activities on Yahoo’s websites, including which stories they are reading. The step is an incredibly appreciable one, but it seems Facebook will be a sure winner with this collaboration, but noting Yahoo’s success, its hard to say.
Talking about the news, Yahoo’s introduction of the Facebook-sharing option in its main new section was known to many users, as it was introduced three months ago. The upgradation is that the same feature will now be available in 26 other parts of Yahoo’s site, including its “omg” service for entertainment news and sections devoted to television, movies and games.
Agreed, with this, Yahoo is aiming to get a number of users to move around its own services. But as far as the past is concerned, it has rarely been seen that websites, with such an integration get users hooked to their websites, even if they are trying to ride on Facebook’s popularity.
Another reason is that Yahoo is trying to attract advertisers by announcing the deep integration. If it is trying to lure advertisers, then it should even note the difference barring between these two websites. On one hand, it is Facebook’s influential position, which is only growing from strength to strength and on the other hand, it is Yahoo, who has struggled to get hold of an average search engine share too.
Yahoo definitely has the resources to keep up itself, but at the same time, it is even faced with a number of challenges, which are affecting the search engine giant negatively. Worse was the switch over of the CEOs. Yahoo has gone through three different CEOs in the past four years while its revenue and stock price have only dropped. In fact, the current situation is terrible, which has even made the company think of the worst possible option, which is to sell off Yahoo.
Coming back to the topic, Yahoo has been quite pleased with its integration with Facebook in the last three months, as it noted that the traffic to Yahoo has been all good news as its news section traffic has tripled since that sharing feature was introduced.
But it should not be concluded noting that the majority of Yahoo users are liking it or even know it. For the stats, it was noted that out of the 700 million Yahoo users, only 12 million have opted to share their news stories till now. It was even noted that this feature has been catch to attract users in the age group of 18 to 24.
Mike Kerns, Yahoo vice president of social, games and personalization, told CNET, “So now on all comments in the U.S, if I leave a comment on a Yahoo News story and someone was to comment on it or rate it, I would get a notice about that.” He continued saying, “Before we launched this the amount of actions that were being published from Yahoo to Facebook that would occur within a month are now occurring within a day.”
Yahoo, has integrated the feature in almost every section, but its two of the most popular sections are still in the dark about this feature. These sections are finance and sports. It was noted that these sections would get the feature early next year.