Global media site and search engine Yahoo launched an SA-specific portal on Tuesday. The site aggregates SA news from the likes of the Daily Maverick, AFP, Association Press and Reuters, and will offer users mailboxes on a .co.za domain.

The question is why it’s launching only now, given that Google, with Gmail and Google News SA, and Microsoft, with Windows Live Mail and Howzit MSN, are already entrenched in the local market.

Yahoo says it serves more than 15bn advertisements a day, most of these either on its front page or on its mail login page. The company claims it already has more than 2,6m SA users who account for 300 000 unique views per day on Yahoo group websites.

Will Green, MD at Yahoo SA’s PR agency Apurimac, says that although the local site will only serve aggregated and syndicated content for the foreseeable future, he believes consumers will benefit because of the way in which Yahoo customises content for users based on their previous behaviour.

Yahoo has an engine, which it calls the Core, that drives this behavioural tracking. Green says this customisation has resulted in click-through rates on content increasing by up to 270% in other markets where Yahoo already operates.

Matt West, director of content partnerships and expansion markets at Yahoo says the company’s e-mail service is the doorway for consumers into other Yahoo services. Most Yahoo users in SA utilise it for e-mail. This allows for targeted advertising “because we know age and gender of users”, West says.

He says he expects use of the service to grow because the company will push relevant content to users of the mail service and there is now the option of a localised Yahoo mailbox with unlimited storage.

For now, only news, mail and sports content will be localised, meaning other sections of the site, like finance, will still direct to international Yahoo properties. Yahoo also doesn’t have any plans for local servers to host mail and other services, meaning users are still routed to its international data centres.

Howzit MSN, Microsoft’s SA portal, operated under licence by Kagiso, enjoys enormous viewership in SA thanks in part to the fact that it’s the default landing page for the Internet Explorer Web browser.

Whether Yahoo will be able to win over SA users by relying on its Web-based e-mail service without offering unique localised content is far from clear. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral