Yahoo Announces Mobile Development Suite, Including ‘Search In Apps’

Yahoo recently announced its “Search in Apps” product at the company’s first mobile developers conference. The new feature allows application developers to incorporate search into apps and to earn a percentage of the revenue that comes from clicks on ads.

Yahoo Search in Apps is one of several features in the company’s Mobile Developers Suite that was unveiled at the conference. The free offering brings multiple products together for app developers, to help them to drive app installs and subsequently analyze and monetize their traffic and usage. Relying significantly on personnel from Yahoo’s Flurry acquisition and its deep penetration into the mobile developer community, Yahoo is launching an ambitious plan to extend the reach of its search, display and video ads.

The Developer Suite includes:

• Flurry Analytics with Explorer (app analytics)
• Yahoo App Publishing (app monetization)
• Yahoo App Marketing (user acquisition)
• Yahoo Search in Apps (Yahoo web search integration + ads)
• Flurry Pulse (transmission of data to partners)

Flurry is currently embedded as an analytics solution in more than 600,000 apps, which reaches 1.6 billion devices worldwide and sees a third of all app activity globally. In comparison, Facebook stated that it had 745 million mobile daily active users on average for December 2014. This data provides insight into the massive level of Flurry’s, and now Yahoo’s, mobile scale.

One interesting aspect of the developer suite is “Yahoo Search in Apps.” This tool marks Yahoo’s effort to syndicate its search box and search ads across the many apps that are using Flurry Analytics. Although there wasn’t a lot of time spent on this at the conference, it holds important implications for Yahoo search’s revival. The company recently integrated search into its Android launcher Aviate, which is a promising app. The developer suite could be much more significant if there is meaningful adoption, and it could result in greatly increased mobile search volume and revenue for Yahoo.

For Yahoo, two significant parts of the developer suite are Yahoo App Publishing and Yahoo App Marketing, both of which leverage the company’s BrightRoll and Gemini ad platforms. Gemini combines native, video and social advertising.

“We learned a lot at Yahoo in our transformation from banner ads to native advertisements,” explained Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. “Advertisers have clear goals. Yahoo really strives to take the power of ads and ad targeting to mobile. It’s no surprise there’s huge demand for mobile advertising.”

The goal of all of these tools seems to be to lure developers with effective monetization tools while increasing the reach of Yahoo search and ads. Mayer has increasingly focused on search, particularly on mobile, since she took over as Yahoo CEO in 2012. She has stated that prior to her arrival, mobile was just a “hobby” for Yahoo. Mayer says that the company now has in excess of 500 staff members working full-time on mobile, and it’s certainly having an effect. Yahoo’s revenue from mobile ads grew to $254 million last quarter, accounting for 20 percent of the company’s revenues. This marks a significant increase, even though it still falls well behind competitors such as Facebook and Twitter.