What is the Holy Grail for online marketers? Well, it starts with knowing in real time whether your campaign is working or not. And it ends with turning that insight into tweaks that improve performance.

After all, nothing is worse for advertisers — and consumers — than marketing that bombs.

Enter IndexTools, a leading provider of Web analytics software for online marketing, which we announced we’re acquiring today. Their technology will give our customers tools for monitoring and analyzing websites and marketing campaigns, providing valuable insights into key metrics, traffic patterns and performance. And that means consumers are more likely to see marketing content that’s engaging and relevant.

We’ll initially make these tools available to our vast community of 150,000 small- to medium-sized business customers, but we’ll eventually extend them to third party developers who can use them to track how their applications are performing with visitors.

When it comes to marketers, we have just one goal: To be their partner of choice. IndexTools is another great arrow in our quiver.

Bassel Ojjeh
SVP and Head of Yahoo! Strategic Data Solutions

With the explosion of video content on the Web, it’s no surprise that video advertising has seen impressive growth rates. Forrester estimates that online video advertising will grow to more than $4 billion in 2011. Compelling stats for those in the advertising business. So compelling that today we announced the acquisition of Maven Networks, an industry-leading video platform provider.

This Cambridge, Massachusetts, start-up has developed a video publishing platform that boasts partnerships with more than 30 major media companies, including Fox News, Scripps Network (properties like HGTV and The Food Network), Gannett (including USAToday.com), Sony BMG, CBS Sports, Hearst Magazines, CNET, and the Financial Times. A list that grows more distinguished as time goes on. Maven helps these publishers distribute and/or monetize their content through a unique new advertising platform, which includes a great new non-intrusive ad format.

Adding Maven to our arsenal of capabilities is an important milestone as we focus on providing advertisers and publishers the best possible tools for reaching their audiences — on our network and beyond. For advertisers, it means more inventory, more choice, more audience reach. For publishers, it means being able to better monetize their content and reach more eyeballs. For consumers, it means consistently free access to high-quality video content and ads that are less disruptive, more relevant. It’s win-win all around.

We’re delighted to welcome the Maven team (led by founder and CEO Hilmi Ozguc) and its fantastic technology to the Yahoo! family. We look forward to joining forces to take video to the next level.

Hilary Schneider
EVP Global Partner Solutions

Last year, shortly after I assumed the role of Yahoo! Music’s General Manager, we started saying publicly that we were “de-emphasizing” our premium music offering, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. The fact of the matter is that building a great premium music service takes a huge amount of resources and effort, and it was taking energy away from our important main offerings, music.yahoo.com (the Web’s #1 Music destination), music videos, and LAUNCHcast Radio. Around 25 million people visit Yahoo! Music each month. Relatively speaking, a small percentage of those use Yahoo! Music Unlimited, yet an large portion of our resources were being poured into this service. It was clear to us that we needed to make a major strategic shift.

It wasn’t an easy decision. We’re huge fans of Yahoo! Music Unlimited and those customers include many of our most loyal and valuable. We wanted to be sure those users had the best on-demand music experience available on the Internet.

As a result, we’re pleased to announce Rhapsody as our exclusive partner for on-demand music. Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers will have a chance to easily take their music catalogs and migrate to Rhapsody. Later this year we will be integrating Rhapsody into music.yahoo.com, so you can continue to use Yahoo! Music for music discovery, news, videos, lyrics, radio, concerts, blogs, and more, and always be a click away from music on-demand. Also, our subscribers will finally have access to the best off-PC experiences such as Rhapsody for TiVo, Sonos, and Control 4 in the living room.

We hope being able to take your Yahoo! Music Unlimited collection to the best subscription service on the Web — the one which works on PC or Mac, Firefox or Safari as well as TiVo, Sonos, etc. — at the Yahoo! Music Unlimited price, is an acceptable outcome. We sincerely apologize for any hassle and thank you for joining us in the Yahoo! Music Unlimited run. It was a wild ride for all of us.

I’m sure a question many people are going to ask is if this means Yahoo! is backing away from online music. Au contraire. It is a major strategy shift but we’re still investing in our music business as evidenced by my second bit of news: our acquisition of FoxyTunes. FoxyTunes is the world’s most popular media toolbar, a plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer. FoxyTunes adds useful functionality to more than 30 media players, including iTunes, Winamp, and Pandora. With FoxyTunes you can easily control your media player from the place you spend most of your time, your Web browser, and jump from a track playing in any media player to lyrics, biography, videos, or more music in a single click. What’s more, the innovative “Signatunes” feature helps you express yourself via your music tastes by automatically inserting signatures into your favorite email program (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail), social network messages (Facebook, MySpace), or blog authoring/commenting platform, based on the currently playing track.

For an excellent tour of FoxyTunes’ far-reaching functionality, please see the screencast on FoxyTunes.com.

While it doesn’t tell the whole story, this news, along with the recent news of our Web Media Player (for a great example of the player in use, check out Aurgasm.us), points the direction for a new Yahoo! Music. We’re focusing on delivering relevant music experiences on the Web and are happy to be partnering with Rhapsody to bring you a simple, integrated, on-demand music experience.

If you’ve never used Rhapsody, check out my best of 2007 playlist on Rhapsody now for free. And be sure to control Rhapsody.com and learn more about each artist with FoxyTunes. ;)

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music