14 DAY TRIAL // In the past couple of years, Yahoo has made dozens of acquisitions, surprising us all with the rhythm in which it has been buying startups left and right. Most of these were designed to help the company strengthen its mobile division.
Adam Cahan was hired by Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, almost two years ago and was asked to start this new division, trying to redirect the company towards a path that would pay off in the future – mobile.
In an interview for CNET, Cahan said that he wasn’t sure this was the best idea for Yahoo. “If mobile is going to be big, everybody should be focused on mobile. Why would we have an independent organization?” he wondered.
Two years and 40 acquisitions later, Cahan is now convinced that this was the right way to go. In the months passed since the unit was formed, in October 2012, Yahoo has given its tools a new look, ranging from Email, Weather, Finance and even Flickr, the company’s photo storing service. Now, they all work well on smartphones and tablets, falling in line with the global trend.
Months after purchasing Summly, Yahoo launched News Digest, the new mobile product that delivers aggregated news from an array of topics straight to users’ devices twice a day.
The purpose of it all was to lure away customers from competitors, to get people to visit more of its site and thus to generate more ad money, which is where the battle takes place. While the company has yet to be proud enough of its results to break down ad money by their source, Yahoo did mention that over half of its monthly traffic comes from mobile devices. This should, in theory, translate into a lot of money coming in thanks to its mobile tools.
Cahan said that Yahoo was just finding its way into how to monetize this new area best, where Facebook is considered a pioneer after swiftly implementing an effective system following its IPO.
“We came to the realization that, wow, we are late to the game. We are 12 months – maybe 18 months – late to the game. We need to play really rapid-scale catch-up,” he said, which explains the massive acquisition process that Yahoo has been going through.
While some of these purchases have been left alone, those are few and far between. Instead, Yahoo has preferred to shut them down, and use the talent behind the project to build similar tools for the company or to improve already existing ones.