In the next three years, 40% of Yahoo!’s business will be on a mobile device rather than a PC, according to Blake Chandlee, director of UK Media Sales at Yahoo! UK & Ireland, who was speaking on the panel at MediaTel Group’s ‘Future of Digital’ seminar yesterday.
“That is a staggering transition for us,” he said. “We’re betting very, very heavily on mobile and portability as a sustainable model.”
Chandlee said that the company was launching the platform into the market tomorrow in a “very big way”. He said that the consumer demand was there and that the ad-funded model was certainly the way forward, with consumers willing to accept advertising for premium content.
Phone companies have to deal with the tariff situation to create user engagement, he stated, pointing out that people do not know how much it costs them to go online on a mobile, saying that this is a huge barrier for entry from a consumer point of view.
The mobile phone is becoming more of a communications device than just a mobile, and the industry must get the payment model right in order for it to succeed, said Ray Snoddy, media journalist and fellow panellist.
Despite some reservations in the media industry, he indicated, mobiles and mobile advertising might just become more important than previously predicted.
Yesterday it was announced that Yahoo! would be going head-to-head with existing mobile ad serving networks by unveiling its own advertising platform at the same time as extending its oneSearch engine.
The Yahoo! Mobile Ad network will allow mobile publishers in 19 countries to run advertising across their sites in a variety of formats including banners, pre-roll video bumpers and in-game ads.
Yahoo! is also extending its mobile-specific oneSearch service, currently live in the US. It will index content from publishers without a mobile presence if they submit relevant information to the search engine.
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