Yahoo has expanded its oneSearch service (launched in January this year) to the mobile web — meaning that you don’t have to download the Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 app to use it, just go to m.yahoo.com and there’ll be a link to it there. The move is designed to make the service available to a much wider audience: Around 85 percent of handsets in the US have some kind of internet browsing capability.
Lee Ott, Director, Mobile Web, Yahoo, told me that monetization was built into the service from the ground up, with ads included in the service. The ads on the mobile oneSearch service will be different to those on the PC web. “How you monetize it is going to be different from what you see on PC,” said Lee. “Advertising is most successful when it connects to people who want to be connected to.” There are some screenshots of searches on oneSearch for Apple, NYC and pizza, which shows that the order of results returned changes depending on the search term.
At the moment the service is only “available” in the US. Anyone with an internet-enabled phone can surf into the site, but since it’s optimized to give results local to the searcher the experience isn’t going to be as good. Over the coming months oneSearch will roll out in additional country and language versions, although GPS-enabled handsets aren’t nearly as common outside the US, so the consumers will have to input their locations.
Despite the proliferation of mobile search services and other services which offer mobile advertising opportunities Lee is confident that Yahoo will see an increase in revenue from the offering because interest is increasing along with ad inventory.
“We do believe that 2007 is the tipping point for mobile, and mobile search…The ecosystem is ready,” said Lee. “Over the long haul I definitely expect mobile to be a valuable ad spot.” He declined to comment on what some commentators view as an inflated price for mobile ads, but said that mobiles have the advantage of numbers, the fact that they’re always with a person and they are time and location sensitive — things that advertisers will pay a premium for. In any case, the number of mobile phones eclipses that of Pcs, and while only a portion of those have internet capabilities that portion is growing. Lee is confidant that mobile will eventually eclipse PC in terms of number of ads served.
Related stories:
–Yahoo Go For Mobile 2.0 Makes It To Windows Mobile
–Yahoo Go To Make A Second Go At It: New Version; More Aggressive Marketing
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