Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Yahoo!7 rebounds strongly in May off the back of Answers

After a rough April, Yahoo7 has shown some positive signs in May with month on month growth of 13.9% and Year on Year growth of 9.5%

What would be especially pleasing to the Y7 powerbrokers is the growth in products such as Answers, Homepage, Mail and News. Yahoo's search product was up month on month to 1.44m users, but down year on year by 83,000 users.

When you look closely at the number, it is the Answers product that is really driving increased usage

Numbers are below for May 2008 (source: Netview)

Yahoo!7 (total audience) - 5.6m (up from 5.15m in May 07)
Answers - 2.34m (up from 1.02m in May 07)
Homepage - 1.96m (up from 1.84m in May 07)
Mail - 1.49m (up from 1.36m in May 07)
News - 1.11m (up from 961k in May 07)
Search - 1.45m (down from 1.52m in May 07)

I think the key for continued Yahoo! growth is moving the Answers audience into other areas of the network. Right now - this isn't happening.

Only 24% of Answers users use the Yahoo homepage, 19.4% use Mail, 17.8% use News and 20.5% use search,

Another challenge is to make Answers 'stickier' ... users are only viewing 7 pages per person, visiting 1.87 times a month and spending 3 and a half minutes on the site. These metrics are far lower than those for the homepage, mail, news etc ... and suggest that most of Answers traffic is coming via search. Ie - in and out traffic ... not pursuing the rest of the network, merely getting an answer and leaving.

Still - it seems to be providing a steam of new network users which the group has needed.

1 comment:

digital contrarian said...

ya i agree its pretty good for answers growth, migth be good to focus on using that tool to push people into higher yield branded environments as answers doesnt have any natural advertiser sets that would find it compelling.