Kicking off her company’s investor’s day, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz tried to quell analyst concerns about the company’s engagement numbers by talking up the company’s aspirations to personalize its sites. “Why if we have 600 million users around the world shouldn’t we have 600 million unique pages for you,” she said. Bartz noted that efforts to personalize the “Today” module on the Yahoo home page had nearly doubled the click through rate there, while those who used My Yahoo were much more engaged. Missing: How far along any efforts to automatically personalize Yahoo properties actually are.
Still, the comments come during a week in which Bartz has gone on the offensive to portray her company as moving forward on a number of fronts. This week, so far, the company has completed its outsourcing efforts (handing off Yahoo Personals to Match.com), purchased an Indonesian check-in service and also announced a major mobile partnership with Nokia.
Some other highlights from Yahoo’s investor’s day, which is being streamed live here:
– Competition? Bartz laid out clear differences between Yahoo, Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and Facebook — and said the companies didn’t really overlap. Yahoo is about “content and communications,” Google is “mostly search,” while Facebook is “social,” she said. “There’s a place for all of us on the web and that’s what customers are doing.”
– Search: Bartz continues to say that the company is in the search business, despite its partnership with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and asked analysts not to say otherwise. “You will come to any Yahoo page and see web search,” she said. An overhaul of Yahoo’s search site is coming in October.
The company also said the search integration with Microsoft is progressing well; the transition in the U.S. is expected to be completed before the holiday season this year.
– APT: Bartz said the company’s APT display ad platform will be out globally by mid next-year.
I hope that the Yahoo! tendency toward “socialization” does not come at the sacrifice of privacy protection. Yahoo! has been *relatively* strong in the realm of privacy (insofar as I’ve been able to see). To lose this, will be to lose customers.