Yahoo finds gateway to Irish market with dedicated site

TECHNOLOGY COMPANY Yahoo is turning its attention to the Irish market, with a dedicated Irish site, new offices and a focus on the online advertising market here.

Rich Reilly, Yahoo’s senior vice-president for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, said the Irish market was important to the US-based firm.

“There are a few things that make the Irish market attractive for us. It has about a €100 million advertising market, and it’s growing at about 10 per cent a year, so even with the economic challenges in Ireland, the shift of dollars from offline to online continues,” he said.

“We’ve also found in markets that when the per cent of ads that goes online crosses the 10 per cent number, it tends to be a tipping point in terms of really becoming a core part of the media mix that advertisers use. That’s where we’re starting to see the Irish market go.”

Mr Riley was in Dublin to officially open the technology company’s office in Clontarf. He described it as a “significant investment” for the company here.

Although he did not reveal the exact figure that Yahoo had put into its Irish enterprise, he said it was a multimillion euro investment.

“This is really one of our first markets outside the big five European markets where we have a dedicated site, dedicated editorial and sales resources,” he said.

Yahoo employs more than 200 people in Dublin. The Irish office has editors to ensure the website’s content is relevant, and advertising sales staff to work with local agencies.

“We now have a specific Yahoo Ireland site that’s 100 per cent focused on the Irish market,” Mr Riley said.

The changes have led to a significant increase in the number of people using the site, he said, with the company claiming an increase of about 40 per cent in users, making it the fourth most popular site in Ireland, it said.

In previous years, Yahoo had fallen behind search giant Google in terms of market share.

Google currently employs about 1,500 people here.

Although Yahoo’s figures are not yet scaling the same heights, and there was no announcement on any planned job creation, Mr Riley said the company would not have invested so much in the Dublin office if it wasn’t “highly confident” that it would need such a premises and that it represented a strong commitment to the country.

“I would plan to maintain the presence that we have,” Mr Riley said.

Yahoo altered its strategy recently in an attempt to kick-start growth. This includes new services tailored to individual users, and it has recently signed a number of partnerships that it hopes will help it regain some ground against its rivals and bring innovation into the market.

One of these partnerships was its much-publicised link-up with Microsoft under a deal struck in 2009. As part of the agreement, Microsoft provides the search engine on all sites operated by Yahoo, while Yahoo took over advertising sales on Microsoft’s websites and also uses its AdCenter platform.

“The deal saves us a lot of cost in terms of creating the algorithmic index, and that lets us reinvest those savings into innovation,” he said.

Prior to signing the search deal, Yahoo rebuffed Microsoft’s attempts to buy the firm for $44 billion in 2008.