Yahoo's new web portal launched

Despite being left in Google's wake in recent years, Yahoo is set to relaunch itself by unveiling its new web portal with the aid of a US $100 million global advertising campaign.

Yahoo! will launch a global brand campaign over 15 months under the slogan "It's Y!ou", featuring the familiar Yahoo! exclamation mark. Other slogans in the new campaign include "The Internet is under new management: Yours" and "The Internet has a new personality: Yours". Yahoo! emphasised recent technological innovations with updates to its homepage, e-mail, video and search services

It also features headlines from the Telegraph, Guardian and Daily Mail newspapers.

The 'rebranding' of Yahoo is the first move of the company's new boss Carol Bartz who was brought in to rejuvenate the company's traffic and revenues. The new homepage will now allow users to integrate third-party web services like Facebook or Hotmail, but industry experts think it may be too little too late. Speaking to the BBC, they argued that most web users now ignore portals and use search engines to go directly to the page they want.

Despite that, Google has continue to grow and grow and is one of the most successful companies in the world and the biggest online firm. Rich Riley, Yahoo's senior vice-president believes that this is because users still go to portals firsts and that that is why Yahoo's new site will enable the company to make money from advertising.

"Frontpage adverts are incredibly powerful," said Mr Riley, "and can cost millions of dollar for a single day of global advertising."

Carol Bartz has also hinted that in revitalising the company, some businesses could be sold. Speaking to The Times, she said, "We're really revisiting everything. Where it makes sense, we will sell, and where it makes sense, we will shut down. The focus of the company is really to engage and personalise Yahoo for the users and to do that we need to be ready to put our signature on the bottom of every page on the internet that has Yahoo on it."

Yahoo, whilst under Jerry Yang's management, famously turned down a $47.5 billion buyout from Microsoft and saw its share prices plummet. Since then, Yahoo and Microsoft have signed a search advertising partnership this year, which is still being scrutinised by regulatory authorities in the United States and Europe.

Comapred to Google, Yahoo has been struggling to turn a profit making a mere $141 millio profit on revenues of $1.57 billion during the past three months.

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