Now Under The Oath Brand, Yahoo Finance's Strategy Can Be Boiled Down To One Word: Utility

The last few years haven’t been the most stable for Yahoo. After struggling for years to adapt to the mobile age, the search engine’s story concluded last June, when a sale of its internet assets to Verizon Communications Inc. VZ was completed and the site was packaged along with several other media properties under the Oath brand.

But despite years of corporate uncertainty in the face of its declining search business, several of Yahoo’s brands have set themselves apart as industry leaders.

One such brand is Yahoo Finance, which not only serves as a massive aggregator of financial news — including from Benzinga — but has also expanded its content offerings to include live video and podcasts.

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While she "absolutely" believes Yahoo Finance is a content leader, Joanna Lambert, the website's general manager of finance and tech, said at the 2018 Benzinga Global Fintech Awards that she's also focused on the site's overall utility. 

“The utility of the product is critical,” she said, noting that Yahoo's portfolio feature is among its most popular.

“The next step is what other types of financial solutions might we be able to provide? For example, we’ve integrated with TradeIt to facilitate trades through [the site].”

Lambert, who’s only been in her role since April, said she’s thinking about mobile and digital video to help diversify Yahoo Finance’s audience, and that she’s also considering some sort of premium product, though no specific plans are in place yet.

A problem plaguing much of the digital media space right now is the question of how heavily to rely on algorithms to generate what readers see, Lambert said. 

“The thing we’re balancing right now is how much do you want to have curated and how much do you want to have through algorithms? You may have stuff you want to know, but there’s probably something happening in the market that you need to know as well. We need to find that balance.”

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Photo: Benzinga CEO Jason Raznick and Joanna Lambert, general manager of finance and tech for Yahoo Finance, onstage at the 2018 Benzinga Global Fintech Awards in New York City. Photo by Mandar Parab.