Yahoo! has launched a website that visualizes the traffic to its web sites and allows users to customize results based on various demographic categories.
Photo: Yahoo statistics, a snapshot from www.visualize.yahoo.com
This is a first step on a long way to big improvements Yahoo! hopes to roll out in the next few months that will personalize the content experience on its sites, said Mike Kerns, Yahoo!’s VP-social and personalization, in an interview to AdAge.
This is a part of Yahoo!’s big campaign of gaining more loyalty which started last month with integrating some of its sites with the Facebook Open Graph so that visitors could share and discover with friends.
Yahoo! already has more than 13 million different variations of its homepage a day based on assumptions derived from past activity, but it still fails to adequately ask its visitors what kind of content they actually want to see.
«Yahoo! today does a very poor job listening to its users in a way they can give us credit for,» said Kernis. «If we just give them some simple ways—a la Pandora, Zite or Amazon—to give us feedback, we can start showing them very obviously that they’re seeing content based on what we know we think about you or what we think we know about you.»
Yahoo!’s team is working on development of a system that will give users a way to declare what they’re interested in reading, and have that weighted in the discovery algorithm. The system is to power Yahoo! sites, along with moving its mobile newsstand, Livestand, toward a more-personalized experience.
Yahoo! also launches an online series ‘Electric City’ featuring Tom Hanks later this year.
Another internet giant, YouTube continues to expand well, too. Last month it unveiled interesting statistics. YouTube claims that now 60 hours of video are being uploaded to its platform every minute, an increase of more than 25 percent in the last eight months. To help tracking the statistics, YouTube has launched a onehourpersecond.com—an interactive collection of what happens in a YouTube second.