Instead of trying to fight the move towards other platforms, Yahoo has moved to make integration easier for its 300+ million users.
Yahoo is one company that understands their market and has moved towards strengthening their portal with a move towards personalisation. While existing members can currently customise their Yahoo homepage they have to use Yahoo widgets which limits its reach as platforms like Facebook & Twitter grow. Instead of trying to fight the move towards other platforms, Yahoo has moved to make integration easier for its 300+ million users.
The new move which has been launched today for the US market allows their users to customise their webpage with third party widgets/apps. The biggest change is that Yahoo has acknowledge that most people only use a handful of Yahoo services so has opened the platform. Yahoo users can now embed a Facebook app directly onto their yahoo page.
The new homepage rollout is being gradually rolled out across the world starting in the US market. It will be available to France, India and then UK followed by other markets. The interesting point is that the top market for Yahoo based on visitor data does not follow this rollout. This is likely not a political move but in fact issues due to language complications. 
The Top Markets
- USA
- India
- China
- Taiwan
- UK
- Iran
- Indonesia
- Germany
- Italy
- Brazil
- Canada
- France
The interesting point is that one of the biggest benefits of Yahoo having easy to add Facebook module, its existing users are likely to add these and stay within the Yahoo network. The benefit for Yahoo is increased Ad placement rates and a improve ad revenue model as Yahoo can now run highly targeted contextual advertising.
As you can see from the image the Facebook news feed talks about “baby” and likely other posts not displayed have references to “kids” or “children”. The Yahoo Ad platform can read this contextual information and can now display relevant ads directly within the Facebook module. You can see that the Quaker advertisement is directly targeting these conversations using its Yahoo Ad network.
This increased relevance of advertising is useful for consumers, but very effective and interesting for prospective advertisers. They can now reach deep into these platforms previously out of reach such as Facebook using the Yahoo Ad network.
This new homepage allows Yahoo to increase their profits while providing an increase service to their members. You can see that the Yahoo platform now also looks cleaner and less cluttered and has through months of intensive testing to get this right.
So while people outside of the USA have to wait, it looks like it is worth the wait…