Yahoo! Planning to Revamp Its Sites to Include Third-Party Content

Today in Yahoo’s headquarters the management of the company has presented to journalists their plan to revamp some of Yahoo properties with a focus on adding third-party content. The idea is that such content will make Yahoo more of a destination to users and will improve the situation where visitors use Yahoo as a springboard to jump to other sites in virtually no time.

The sites to experience the redesign include Yahoo homepage, Search page, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Music, and Yahoo News as well (probably other properties that have not been specified yet).

One of the services that Yahoo provided details on the planned redesign for is Yahoo Music. The site will be integrated with Pandora radio service as well as will feature integrations with Amazon and iTunes to buy music via these stores. These changes are promised to be implemented in the next few weeks. Yahoo News is also supposed to get some extra third-party content and feature more local stories from partner newspapers.

The third-party content will include not only text or music content aggregated from other sites for consumption on Yahoo, the plan also includes using third-party widgets to allow Yahoo visitors to interact with other websites without leaving Yahoo properties.

One such example has been demonstrated with Netflix widget where a user will be able to access their Netflix movie rental queues right from Yahoo Search or Yahoo Mail. They also demonstrated an example of user interacting with Craigslist classifieds right when using Yahoo Mail. In general, Yahoo Mail sounds like it will become the largest platform to host third-party applications - like those to send invitations to events or build photo albums without going to photo hosting sites. Such widgets built by third-party developers are supposed to appear on Yahoo by the end of this year.

This already sounds like a strategy to me as it is supposed to provide a better experience to users that will spend more time on various Yahoo properties and view more pages there as well. Those increased pageviews are obviously intended to boost Yahoo advertising revenue - and investors seem to be very optimistic about the news: Yahoo’s stock has jumped on NASDAQ by 4.8% today (or $.85) to close at $18.55.

I think we will only be able to make our own conclusions once we see the results of such a redesign by the end of the year but I also hope that we will see content from Yahoo properties like Flickr, MyBlogLog and Delicious deeper integrated into main Yahoo sites since I still feel that with the current approach Yahoo tends to neglect the excellent properties it owns.