Ever since Marissa Mayer took the top position at Yahoo they have been talking about how important mobile is to the future of Yahoo. While they have made a lot of moves toward improving their overall mobile presence, few of them were really designed to increase Yahoo’s revenue or market position. According to a blog post from Yahoo, they are making a significant move that looks like it will have a big impact for the internet giant.
Yahoo Gemini is a, “unified marketplace” that combines mobile search and native advertising in an easy to use platform.
Jay Rossiter, the Senior Vice President of Yahoo’s Cloud Platform Group, wrote “By bringing the two together, advertisers can now buy, manage and optimize their mobile search and native ad spend in one place – driving greater performance and higher impact for their businesses and brands.”
This is an important move for Yahoo, and one that some people are expecting will improve their position against Google’s dominant ad network. While Google is already a major player in mobile advertising, there is still an opportunity for Yahoo (or other networks) to position themselves well. Focusing on the mobile advertising area has many benefits for Yahoo.
Obviously, the mobile ad market is growing extremely rapidly, so any business they can bring in now will only grow going forward. In addition, however, if Yahoo can establish themselves as a leader for mobile marketing, they are also likely to grow their native advertising customers over time.
Yahoo hopes that the Yahoo Gemini system will engage their customers in a natural way that will make it extremely easy for them to harness Yahoo’s large mobile user base. While it is still too early to see what type of adoption Gemini will have, it is a big move for Yahoo.
You can see the full blog post from Yahoo HERE.
