My Yahoo! Reaches 30 Million Mark

To add to Greg’s post last week about My Yahoo!, there was an interesting article in The New York Times yesterday about the site’s usage and strategy.

The Times reports that as of December, there were 30 million Americans that have created a My Yahoo! page. RSS is the main feature of My Yahoo!, but the site has marketed its advantages without ever using the term "RSS" (yet another tech acronym that has the potential of scaring away mainstream Internet users).

Making an easy way to create RSS feeds, and partnering with news and travel sites on which an "add to My Yahoo!" button is offered, has proved successful.

The company is now developing the next-generation RSS software called media RSS, in anticipation of the ramp up in demand for online video. As Yahoo! told us directly, this will be a powerful tool for users to create a personalized hub and launchpad for all their digital media.

The next step is to continue forming partnerships with travel, shopping, auto, jobs and other verticals to make it easy for users to set up feeds on their My Yahoo! pages for alerts that fit their predefined criteria (see our recent advisory RSS and Email Alerts: Shopping 2.0). This could prove to be a powerful tool for classifieds and other advertisers to get in front of users that have expressed a very specific interest.

Mike Boland

Mike Boland is an analyst with the Kelsey Group.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Neal

    Pretty amazing that Yahoo has a audience of 30 million. Few broadcast television shows garner audiences even close to 30 million. Seems like a perfect way to leverage all their video stuff to really move the needle on Interent TV stuff.

  2. Donna

    Out of the "30 million Americans that have created a MyYahoo page" what percentage actively use its features? Many Americans create blogs at free blog sites, but never populate them.

  3. Menny

    Yahoo estimates 24.5 million in 2005

  4. Seb

    Talking about RSS feeds: I’ve tried integrating your new Blog’s RSS feed into the Google personalized home page without success. Anyone managed to do it?

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