14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo is continuing its slim-fast diet and shedding yet another one of its services. Yahoo Personals is to be no more, as the service will be outsourced to IAC’s Match.com. Existing users will be able to switch over to the new service dubbed “Match.com on Yahoo.” The move is the latest in a long line of outsourcing deals or outright closures of some of the fringe services Yahoo had on offer.
“Yahoo! Personals users will receive special offers designed to help them enjoy all that Match.com has to offer. The two companies are working together to help users easily migrate to Match.com on Yahoo!. Over the next two months, existing Yahoo! Personals members will be given the opportunity to seamlessly migrate their Yahoo! Personals accounts over to the new experience,” the two companies said in a joint press statement.
“Match.com on Yahoo! offers compelling features including mobile access, daily personalized matches and robust search tools and will fully replace the existing Yahoo! Personals experience at the end of the transition period,” they added.
Match.com will become the only provider of online dating services for Yahoo in the US and elsewhere. Some of Yahoo’s European properties were already using Match.com instead of the in-house service. In the long term, Yahoo Personals will be completely replaced by Match.com’s new offering. The new site will get the link on the Yahoo homepage that directed to Yahoo Personals and will get the same exposure on Yahoo properties. What’s more, it will also be the sole provider of dating-related display ads.
Yahoo has been shedding off non-essential services for the past year or so as it focuses more on the core properties, the homepage, Yahoo Mail and so on, and ramps up original content creation. It has closed down plenty of services so far and outsourced several. Most notably, its search capabilities were outsourced to Microsoft in a long-term deal that is still developing.