Yahoo, the search giant known for its ambitious endeavors under current CEO Marissa Mayer, is planning on expanding its mobile reach to compete directly with Facebook and Google.
Fresh off their July acquisition of in-app ad analytics platform Flurry and Q3 2014 move to separately report revenues from mobile ads, Yahoo now plans to take mobile ads beyond their own network, allowing them to serve as a competitive ad platform on numerous third-party sites and services.
It’s expected that Yahoo’s native ads — called Stream Ads — will be served through Yahoo Recommends, carrying on from their August move to expand Recommends’ reach to third-party websites.
Yahoo’s new strategy appears to be paying dividends already, as a December eMarketer report projects them passing Twitter to take third place in the American mobile ad market with 3.7 percent share this year. Though that figure is still a far cry from Google‘s 37.2 percent and Facebook‘s 17.6 percent, respectively, it is still impressive and encouraging news for a company looking to reclaim its old perch atop its industry.
Further plans for Yahoo’s mobile ad growth include a decision to give advertisers more latitude to expand their reach with bundled ad campaigns across multiple Yahoo properties, facilitated with help from Yahoo Gemini and their recent acquisition of video ad leader Brightroll.
Though they still have a ways to go, Yahoo has made it abundantly clear that they are not a company to be counted out in the world of mobile, something marketers will certainly note when selecting a network for their advertisements.
