I’m pretty sure you will have heard many times before, but it’s true, in the internet and media world: content is king.

It sounds simple, but what this statement doesn’t do is capture the innovation, the passion and the strives in technology which help Yahoo! deliver the most relevant content to 92 million users in Europe alone by a combining unique technology with human expertise.

First off, you may ask who am I? I am Noelia Fernández Arroyo, VP, Head of Audience in EMEA. I’ve been at Yahoo! for over 13 years. Jerry and the team initially hired me to launch Yahoo! Spain back in 1998. I joined the company because it had the ambition to improve the World through great technology and services, with editorial at the core and you know what, the principle still remains the same today. Yes, I’ve seen changes and have experienced challenges but I firmly believe in Yahoo!’s commitment and passion to create deeply personal experiences on the Web. Yahoo!’s passion, is my passion.

To that point, we have been investing in the right areas and focusing where we can win, and where we are winning! Did you know in Europe’s five largest markets Yahoo! reaches 92 million people, up over 7 million or 9% year on year against a market growth of 2% and we’re ranked number one or two in five categories across Europe: News, Finance, Sport, Flickr and Answers. We are in a unique position where we can leverage our innovation and technology with our European users to deliver compelling content to a mass audience, every day.

We have the best technology combined with talented, global editorial teams who help us turn around events and news that people care about on a global basis. Let me give you an example, the London riots were big news here in Europe, as it was globally. We were seeing a lot of activity on the streets, which was both prolific and sensitive in nature. The flexibility of the global publishing platform allowed our News and Front Page teams to respond quickly to create around the clock coverage and exclusive content in real time and through people’s own eyes. Interestingly, in August, the UK video streams rocketed by 191% on Yahoo! News showing the demand and consumption of rich content in parallel to news stories.

So, how do we do this?

Firstly, we keep investing strongly in our new global content publishing platform. It’s called the Yahoo! Publishing Platform. It’s global but puts power in the hands of local teams here in Europe working for local audiences; it allows us to act much faster to world events and activities and provides a platform for easy integration of rich video content.

So what does the Yahoo! Publishing Platform actually mean for the life of our Editors in Europe?

• In Italy, where Yahoo! Movies is on the Yahoo! Publishing Platform, it took just one hour to create recent coverage of the Cannes Movies Festival which delivered double the performance from the previous year
• We can create and publish original content easily and quickly: in Yahoo! omg! alone we publish over 35 original stories per day unique to Yahoo!
• The Yahoo! Publishing Platform recently launched for Yahoo! Video, Lifestyle and News. A combination of coverage of key events using the new platform led to a 20% increase in Yahoo! News page views in Europe[iv]
• omg from Yahoo! has also launched in Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK
• Yahoo! Movies in Italy launched onto the platform leading to a 60% increase in page views
• So far we have launched 95 products already onto the Yahoo! Publishing Platform

Through our science and technology, we can make informed decisions, based on scientific data rather than predictions and estimations. It allows the editors I work with to get ahead of the game and be first with the right content. This is where C.O.R.E. (Content Optimization and Relevance Engine) comes in, a technology that was developed by Yahoo! Labs a couple of years ago. Sophisticated algorithms and machine learning technology, combined with human expertise allows us to carry out deep personalization to our 674 million users globally and 92 million in Europe.

Did you know?

• Our Editorial team appropriately delivers on average, 35 stories per week day, per market, targeted to our users individual interests based on our own technology
• Yahoo! personalizes 2.2 billion content module experiences on our pages per day
• We show 13 million personalized homepage versions per day and the click through rate in the Yahoo! Magazine on the frontpage has increased by more than 700% in Europe as a result of this technology

So you can see why I am committed, focused and excited to be a Yahoo! and this is just a taste of what we are currently doing here in Europe. I know we have plenty of innovation and new products up our sleeves over the coming months, so watch this space!

Gracias and keep up the purple!

Noelia Fernandez Arroyo
Proud to be a Yahoo!

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series entitled, “In My Own Words,” that gives employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. Feel like yodeling your own? Post your Yahoo! story on your social networks using the hashtag #myYahoostory.

The interactive app takes advantage of the iPad’s multi-touch capabilities so users can manipulate views of stock charts; the ability to scroll across hours, days or months of market action; plot points in time; and even compare multiple stock tickers in one compelling chart. Anyone interested in following the market, or specific stocks on the iPad can now use Yahoo! Finance’s reliable and personalized tools anywhere, anytime.

The potential for this is big. Imagine sitting in a meeting with colleagues discussing market trends you now have real-time pricing data at your side. Want to take a look at how your portfolio is doing today without booting up the computer? MarketDash makes it fast and easy. Every tailored detail fits perfectly to the iPad screen – breaking news, real-time stock updates, and your own personalized portfolio information.

We’ve become so dependent on our mobile devices that it’s important to have a seamless experience across all of the technology we use on a daily basis. That’s why Yahoo! Finance provides centralized storage of portfolios and watch lists. Add a stock to a watch list from your iPad and it will show up instantly in the Yahoo! Finance app for iPhone or Android phones or when you view your portfolio on Yahoo! Finance. No matter where users log into their account they will see updated and personalized portfolio data.

To download MarketDash, go to the App Store on iPad and let us know what you think!

We live in a beautifully content rich world. More than 3.5 million photos get uploaded to Flickr every day. On email we receive nearly 2.5 billion emails each day, and many of us send hundreds of texts and tweets per month. Simply put, life is digital. In order to enjoy and share all this content, people want much more than a PC experience replicated on their tablet or phone—they want something fundamentally new.

As the premier digital media company, we see a clear opportunity to push the boundaries of personalization to deliver intelligent experiences specifically tailored for each individual.  This ultra personalized content experience is our vision for Livestand from Yahoo! – a digital newsstand, delivering a wealth of ever-changing content from multiple publishers, continuously programmed by a person’s interests and contexts.

With Livestand from Yahoo!, what you’re reading will be personalized based on your interests, your location and even the time of day.  Your experiences, which will begin on tablet form factors, will include intuitive touch interactions and an elegant design that focuses foremost on the content.

As the media landscape continues to evolve with mobile and tablet experiences top of mind, publishers and advertisers must expand their content to these platforms to stay in front of consumers.  We see an opportunity to provide publishers and advertisers with a pipeline for fresh and active content and to help them reach and engage their most valuable audiences.

With Livestand, we’re using ad formats that evoke the emotion of TV advertising with a highly-visual magazine-like experience.  And they’re combined with the effectiveness of an Internet ad that’s data-rich, actionable, even location aware.  It’s all personalized and in context – just like our content.

In the first half of 2011, you’ll see Yahoo!’s vast digital content library come to life through Livestand from Yahoo! – from Sports, News, Finance, Flickr, omg!, and the Yahoo! Contributor Network – as iPad and Android tablet applications.

Stay tuned here for more updates over the coming weeks.

Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!
@Blakei

Today’s announcements include the following partnerships and product enhancements:

Share More With a Social Dimension Everywhere on Yahoo!

Yahoo! Messenger Beta – With the new Yahoo! Messenger Beta available today, people can now play social games from publishers like Zynga, ELEX and OMGPOP, share their status across networks, and view, comment on, and “like” updates from Yahoo! Pulse, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter – all from their instant messaging client. Interoperability with Facebook Chat also broadens the group of friends that people can instantly connect and chat with on Yahoo! Messenger. To get the new version of Yahoo! Messenger, visit here and click “Download Now.”

Yahoo! Contributor Network – Announced yesterday, Yahoo!’s new platform enables people to reach an audience of millions by publishing their fresh and authentic content on Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Contributor Network is an evolution of the Associated Content platform and will bring contributions from more than 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers to the Internet’s largest media destinations, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Sports, and even the Yahoo! homepage, among many others. For more information, see here.

Zynga – Starting this week, the first phase of integration with Zynga will allow people to launch, play, and share Zynga’s popular games like Mafia Wars and FishVille on Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Games, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Toolbar, and Yahoo! Pulse.

Twitter – Building on Yahoo!’s Facebook integration, people can now also connect their Yahoo! and Twitter accounts globally to see and share Twitter updates on the Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Pulse.

Discover Local Treasures With Yahoo!

Local Offers – Yahoo! is launching its Local Offers program with more than a dozen partners to provide a wide selection of local deals, coupons, and other offers – from nearby spas, restaurants and other local retailers. Currently in limited beta in the U.S., Yahoo!’s Local Offers program will make it easy for millions of people to find the best local deals and savings on Yahoo!. Launch partners include Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, BloomSpot, BuyWithMe, DealOn, Zozi, CrowdSavings, Lifebooker, FreshGuide, Scoop St, Goldstar, HomeRun, Tippr, Coupons.com, and Valpak, with more partners to come.  For more information, please see the press release here.

Local Search Enhancements – Locally relevant “Quick Apps” will empower people to find restaurants they want and take action on things they discover in a more productive Yahoo! Search. Apps launching later this week include a new and improved Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search for visually zeroing in on a street or neighborhood to find local restaurants – now available across connected devices, including PCs, iPhones, and iPads.  Other new apps will enable easy comparisons of local restaurants and let people make reservations through OpenTable right on the Yahoo! Search results page.  For more on these and other Yahoo! Search enhancements launching this week, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog.

All of these new features are built on Yahoo!’s cloud and technology platforms, allowing for in-depth partner integrations and broad distribution across Yahoo!’s consumer products. For example, the integration with Zynga is enabled by the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), which facilitates easy social sharing of game notifications across Yahoo!’s massive audience.

We designed the Yahoo! Contributor Network especially for you, our users, and we’re inviting you to share your perspective and creativity on some of our most popular content sites – including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, omg!, Shine, and even the Yahoo! homepage. The Yahoo! Contributor Network gives you an unprecedented opportunity to reach the largest audiences on the Internet on the topics that matter to you most.

You’ll be joining the world’s largest community of independent contributors, more than 400,000 writers, photographers, and videographers.

How do you get involved? Simply fill out a form on our registration page and you’re ready to get started. Once you register as a contributor, you can start submitting articles, videos, audio and images – or claim assignments from Yahoo! editors and you might be published on one of Yahoo!’s sites. And better yet, you’ll earn money based on the performance of your articles.

If you’re already an Associated Content contributor, it’s even easier. Sign in to the Yahoo! Contributor Network using your existing username and password and continue to share your content, with an even larger audience.

We encourage you to check out the site today and join up with our growing community of contributors. It’s an incredible opportunity for exposure and distribution of your work.
We look forward to hearing from you!

-Luke Beatty, VP & General Manager

As the newest Yahoo! employee, at the risk of being highly corny, I’m delighted to yodel my first purple-hued shout-out to the 600 million people and tens of thousands of advertisers and publishers who enjoy Yahoo!’s products every day.

Some of you might ask why anyone would say goodbye to surfing and cycling the Central Coast of California or travelling the globe with their family to take on the job of leading products and technology at Yahoo!  My answer’s pretty easy – meet just some of the brilliant people at Yahoo! that want to change the world, and then scan the amazing list of leading products around the globe these people have delivered at scale.  When I think about what this company has meant to anyone who has used the Internet, worked in the Internet industry, or wanted to reach people across the world, there is simply none better.

From wildly popular services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr and Yahoo!’s mobile sites and apps, to Yahoo!’s best-in-class content properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports, to many, many other great products across the world, Yahoo!’s product portfolio continues to be the envy of the industry.  Those incredible services and their respective audiences bring tremendous value for advertisers, which is why Yahoo! serves up 10 billion ads across its network every day and is the #1 publisher of online display advertising. How can anyone not want to be a part of that?

And that’s just what consumers and advertisers see from the outside.  Inside Yahoo!, there’s technological and scientific brilliance everywhere you look.  With 500 patents, one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures, and top scientific talent across computer science, machine learning, economics and social sciences, I’m awed at the caliber of people I’m going to be working with. The intellectual horsepower doesn’t stop there – I’m looking forward to working with some of the smartest and best-in-class talent around the world in marketing, advertising sales, partnerships, programming, service engineering and operations.  The commitment Yahoos have shown over the years to delivering the best experience to both consumers and advertisers is one of the key things that attracted me here.  We’re in the business of delivering bespoke experiences to our consumers, partners and advertisers and I’m looking forward to working with all of you to build on that reality.

This week marks an exciting new journey for me personally, and I’m thrilled to be sharing my experiences and background with the world class people at Yahoo!  We have big opportunities, as well as big challenges ahead of us, and I’m getting ready to dive in and work with this great team to make Yahoo! even more central to daily online life than it has been over the past decade and a half.

My first day in the office will be May 17^th and I can’t wait to get started. Stay tuned for more as I get settled and dig in with my new team.

‘Nuff said.

-Blake Irving, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

Economic traumas. Military entanglements. Crazy weather. And yet, even as we tried to find ways to survive day to day, we were also acutely aware that we were living through momentous times.

The Yahoo! Year in Review returns. Since 2001, we’ve been crunching lists based on search data. Naturally, we’ve expanded quite a bit since those early Internet days, and because a list of 10 is barely a drop in the sea of billions of searches, we’ve expanded beyond that to walk through the moments and events behind the trends.

This year, we have eight primary themes, and not surprisingly, two are finance-focused. “Financial Hangovers” and “Market Darlings” reflect the yin-yang of a rough year. Many of you hunkered down, staycationed, built up credit—and in more heart-wrenching scenarios reflected in searches, checked in with state unemployment sites, foreclosure details, and student loan alternatives. Not all businesses were bailing (or bailed out): Market Darlings touches on the big leap in fiscal viability of social networking sites (or rather, tiny little leaps in 140 characters or less) and e-readers. Whoever said people don’t read anymore needs to get thee to a wireless device.

You didn’t give up the political diet that you were on for the past two years. Aside from a few puzzling gubernatorial detours here and there, many of you focused on a political agenda that ranged from stimulus plans to wayward governors. The one big political category is “Obama in the House.” Barack Obama was the first politician to crack the Yahoo! Top 10 by taking the No. 3 spot in 2008, but he slipped off this year when he became the 44th President. Then again, people knew exactly where he was: on Pennsylvania Avenue, churning out executive orders and setting priorities. No matter if you voted for or protested against, the commander-in-chief commanded the headlines and searches.

We also covered overnight sensations (Susan Boyle) and infamous breakouts (Nadya “Octomom” Suleman) in “Sudden Fame,” newly coined terms in health (H1N1) and science (conficker worm) in “Mad Science,” shocking passings and sad good-byes in “Farewells,” and of course the Top 10 Searches.

Several notable shifts happened in the Top 10. The breaking news that Michael Jackson died became the top search of the year. As many of you know, the Web traffic on June 25, the day the news emerged of his demise, was massive, surpassing even Inauguration Day just months earlier. Online investigations into his death also turned into tributes to the King of Pop’s legacy, as people sought his music, videos, and even costumes to honor him on Halloween night.

While some are familiar faces (WWE, Britney Spears, NASCAR, Runescape), some terms are new: Vampire hysteria vaulted “The Twilight Saga” to the No. 2 slot, savvy rising star Megan Fox got herself in the top 5, and Kim Kardashian isn’t just the new Paris Hilton, but a symbol of reality TV prowess. As for Britney Spears, the princess of pop was hard at work this year on her “Circus” tour, and cut back on the antics that had commanded searches for the last four years of her No. 1 reign.

This year on the Year In Review site,  we also created a “Rewind” video. Check it out here:

YOUR YEAR IN REVIEW:

And as part of the 2009 Year in Review, Yahoo!s have an opportunity to tweet their own top moments of 2009. Tweet your top moments of 2009 here:

http://yearinreview.yahoo.com/2009/moments

By the way, some consider 2009 more than a historical turning point, but also the marker for the decade’s end. This year was more than a handful, but you can take a look at our past top searches by checking these links:

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Vera Chan, Senior Buzz Editor for Yahoo!