Yahoo is cutting ties with Facebook and Google, in a push to collect more data from users of its stable of services such as Flickr and Fantasy Football by requiring them to use Yahoo sign-in details.
The plan to abandon the use of Facebook and Google identities to sign into Yahoo services is designed to help the company personalise the user experience and reduce its reliance on its rivals in social media and search.
Yahoo said it was starting by changing the sign-in process for a Yahoo Sports game and would eventually remove Facebook and Google sign-in buttons from all the company’s sites and apps.
“Yahoo is continually working on improving the user experience, which includes our sign-in process for Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick’Em,” the company said.
Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, is trying to turn round declining revenues at the internet company that had its heyday in the previous dotcom boom. Since she arrived about 18 months ago, she has revamped a stable of products, launched a mobile business and gone on an acquisition spree, primarily as a way of hiring top engineers.
When Yahoo struck the deal with Facebook in 2009, it was seen as a way of acquiring new users who would be happier using an existing log in for one of the other sites.
Facebook Connect allowed the social network to follow users wherever they were on the web to increase time spent on the site and to help the company, and its advertisers, learn more about users.
Facebook’s ability to target marketing to particular users has become such a valuable asset that it is now experimenting with the first stages of a mobile advertising network, which will allow it to use its wells of user information to sell targeted adverts on other sites.
Yahoo’s advertising business is trying to catch up with rivals after Facebook overtook the company to become the second-largest digital advertising platform in the US after Google last year, according to data from E-Marketer, the research group.
Ms Mayer revealed a suite of new advertising platforms at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, designed to improve targeting and give marketers better control across all Yahoo properties from the homepage to apps.
But the company has yet to convince many marketers, with Henrique de Castro, who had steered the advertising business, departing the same month after just over a year in the job.
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