I’m excited today to share that beginning January 8, 2019, Verizon Media Group will replace the Oath brand, representing our strong alignment as a core pillar of Verizon’s business.
This quarter, we’ve made it easier for people to access our unparalleled diversity and quality of consumer products, while making it easier for advertisers and publishers to solve their business challenges with the recent launch of our unified ad platforms. We’ve built on this strong foundation and set our advertising solutions apart by introducing over 20 new features this quarter, including engaging ad formats and unique supply such as digital OOH, connected TV and programmatic audio.
For publishers, we’ve introduced new opportunities through these emerging channels and innovative auction mechanics. These enhancements will better serve our partners with smarter personalization and stronger engagement to constantly improve our ecosystem.
We’ve accelerated the launch of new programs and products in just a few short months:
- We launched the Yahoo app – a new multi-purpose app that provides the best of Yahoo in one place for a cohesive, seamless experience that serves as your personalized daily guide with local weather, your favorite sports teams’ scores and game highlights, top news stories, stock quotes and market news, daily deals, original video content, web search and more.
- We put Yahoo Finance everywhere our consumers are with content like Women and Money and Personal Finance features and grew our off-network distribution opportunities with partners, such as Apple TV, Roku, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. We will dramatically expand our live market coverage to 8 hours of bell-to-bell coverage beginning on January 7. And we’ll deepen our relationship with members when we officially launch our Yahoo Finance Premium subscription – enabling retail investors to transact on informed investment decisions through access to sophisticated tools, unique proprietary data sets and industry-leading research.
- Yahoo Sports kicked off the NFL season by giving fans a live stream experience of the highest quality, with friction-free access to the most local and national games ever seen on mobile devices. Our partnerships with the NFL and NBA demonstrate our commitment to deliver fans the content they crave. Our fans love our NFL Live product. Nearly 90% of the fans who watch NFL games on Yahoo Sports return the following week, 60% of them are 39 or younger, and ads within the live stream achieve a 90% completion rate on average.
- Yahoo Mail launched features to help members find the best shopping deals/coupons, to get the lowest price on what they buy, and improve their online shopping experience. We debuted Yahoo Mail for iOS 12, adding Siri shortcuts to quickly access important information and more. We optimized the Yahoo Mail app for Android Go phones. This year, Yahoo Mail continues to retain a 4.5+ star app rating. Yahoo Mail is available in 46 languages and 72 markets with over ~200M monthly active users.
- Huffpost launched HuffPost LIFE, a newly redesigned and expanded section of HuffPost dedicated to service-oriented, inclusive lifestyle content, in a more brand friendly environment across formats and devices and hosted our inaugural parenting conference.
- BUILD Series expanded its live entertainment program offering, including more than 7 hours of daily live programming from our BUILD Series which has featured nearly 1,300 interviews and over 3,000 on-stage guests creating content that airs on Fios, ROKU, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and more.
- Yahoo Lifestyle launched the NOW//With Network – a celebrity-driven, interactive platform that connects consumers with top talent, brands and products through premium storytelling and interactive shoppable experiences. This unique branded content series kicked off with two editions, featuring actress/entrepreneur Nicole Richie and actress/singer Janel Parrish.
- Yahoo News relaunched its app just in time to deliver best-in-class journalism, breaking at least a dozen major scoops in the past month from the first interview with George Conway, to breaking news on the Russia scandal, and an exclusive report on the immigration crisis from reporter Caitlin Dickson, and many others.
- We made the important decision to change our policy on Tumblr to better position the brand to deliver on its promise: to provide a safe place for communities of all kinds to thrive.
Most exciting, and as part of one Verizon, we’re growing our work on tomorrow’s technologies — XR, AI, machine-learning, mobile-edge computing, 5G and more.
These are the building blocks of how we will continue to evolve our member-centric ecosystem with much more to come.
I look forward to 2019 and what we will accomplish together as Verizon Media Group.
