Yahoo in Huge Mobile Search Deal
Yahoo nets a 16-country Web services pact with America Movil. — NEW YORK (Reuters)—Internet company Yahoo and Latin America's top mobile phone company America Movil said on Thursday they have struck a deal to provide mobile Web services to 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo has spent 2007 assembling carrier-by-carrier distribution for its mobile search service: it relaunched mobile search as oneSearch in March, signed its first mobile advertising partners weeks later, and added nine Asia-Pacific operator partnerships in November. The America Movil agreement is the scale play in that sequence — one contract covering 16 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, with America Movil selecting Yahoo! oneSearch as the preferred search service for its wireless properties.
First-order effects
- Yahoo gains preferred-search placement on America Movil's networks in 16 countries, converting its operator-partnership strategy into regional-scale distribution rather than country-by-country deals.
- America Movil gets a ready-made mobile Web services layer for its subscribers without building search itself, deepening its handset-services bundle after earlier device-level tie-ups like the 2006 Motorola arrangement.
Second-order effects
- Rival Latin American carriers now face the choice of signing their own preferred search partner or ceding default placement to a competitor's network, accelerating the auction of carrier search slots.
- Advertisers gain a multi-country mobile audience under one agreement, building directly on the mobile ad partnerships Yahoo began signing in March 2007 and giving its nascent mobile ad business its first pan-regional inventory.
Third-order effects
- If carrier-preferred search becomes the standard route to mobile users, mobile search competition shifts from handset and browser defaults to operator contracts — making distribution deals, not just search quality, the decisive asset.
- A pattern of regional exclusivity-style arrangements would push the mobile Web toward an operator-gated structure, where access to subscribers in a region runs through a small number of carrier gatekeepers.
The trend: Mobile search distribution is being settled through regional carrier partnerships rather than handset defaults, with Yahoo racing to lock up operators market by market.