Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo continues to push ahead with mobile search distribution deals, despite its search agreement with Microsoft. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company today said that it has signed an exclusive multi-year mobile search deal with German mobile operator O2 Germany; displacing Google to continuing the battle among search providers for placement on mobile phones. O2 will also integrate Yahoo properties into its mobile portal.
More than 15 million Germans should now have something additional Yahoo in their lives. The announcement Monday comes as one that Yahoo made in 2007 with Telefonica, which owns O2. That deal delivered Yahoo search on Telefonica phones in Latin America and O2 in the U.K., but it excluded O2 Germany because that operator had just signed a deal with Google, said Mitch Lazar, managing director of Yahoo Mobile Europe.
A press release made into semi-English by Google Translate stated, “Besides mobile search by O2 customers get through links from the O2 portals direct access to other popular Yahoo! Products such as the Yahoo! Frontpage, Yahoo! Frontpage, Yahoo! Nachrichten, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sport, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finanzen, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Mail oder auch Flickr.”
With 15 million subscribers, O2 Germany is the third largest mobile operator in the country, after T-Mobile, which already has a deal with Yahoo, and Vodafone, which is associated with Google. Lazar stated that the company will now have more than 80 partnerships with mobile operators around the world.
Yahoo won over O2 Germany by showcasing the benefits Yahoo brought to O2 in the U.K., Lazar said. In the U.K., the deal with Yahoo has encouraged users to stay on O2’s mobile portal for longer times, he said.
Search providers are contending aggressively with one another to try to win the loyalty of mobile users, whom they believe can help bring in a significant new source of revenue through advertising. That competition has led to innovations in mobile search.
“We do not believe consumers want millions of links” when searching from a mobile phone, Lazar said. Yahoo was one of the first to tailor search results for mobile users, displaying top results that are more likely to be relevant to a mobile user.
Under the terms of its search and advertising agreement with Microsoft, Yahoo will utilize Bing as its exclusive search platform for PC-based searches. However, the mobile search deals has been left unconnected, with Yahoo allowed to choose other partners if it wants to. Lazar says that nothing had been decided, adding that the relationship between the two companies is still “in the early stages.”
And while all of that would be sensational enough on its own, the new deal’s especially interesting because Yahoo is replacing Google as O2 Germany’s default search provider. It is not every day a swap like that happens. Terms of the O2 Germany deal were not announced, although Yahoo says it is “multi-year.”
The deals with operators can pay off. They “dramatically improve the growth of audience for Yahoo,” Lazar said.