On the Yahoo! Q4 earnings call yesterday, here’s what CEO Carol Bartz had to say about local:
We also have a 200% click through increase in the local part of the news. So that is really important especially as we focus on local . . .
So what is ahead for us this year? We are done looking inward. We are looking outward at the incredible opportunities ahead and we are focused on the following areas; Great experiences for our consumers including more social, mobile and video features and improved local content.
Here’s what she said about mobile:
Mobile is generating a lot of buzz right now so I want to spend a few minutes talking about our strategy. Users clearly expect to have access to the same kind of services they use on the PC but designed for their mobile phones and they want to interact with brands they know and trust. Our strategy is to grow and monetize the Yahoo! audience on mobile.
To do this we are focused on building great experiences that our users love like our mobile homepage, mail, messenger, finance, Flickr and fantasy sports. Today people in 187 countries use our mobile internet services and we have been developing these experiences across thousands of handsets including high end devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and soon Android.
Mobile monetization is in the early stages for everyone right now but it is growing quickly for us. We are having the mobile advertising discussion with our biggest clients every day. In fact we recently signed one of the largest mobile ad buys ever with a major auto manufacturer.
Partners continue to be an important part of our mobile strategy. We are a trusted partner in this space and work with over 100 OEMs and carriers to help distribute our products. We are looking to partner with the right players and ecosystems who can help us reach the largest number of engaged users.
There haven’t been many announcements from Yahoo in either local or mobile of late. Indeed, they’ve largely ceded their early mobile leadership to Google (or at least visibility and buzz). Yahoo can and should make some aggressive moves in both of these areas this year.
Screenwerk 
January 28, 2010 at 2:41 am
[…] local initiative, which has yet to debut. And on an earnings call this week, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said users are clicking local content at a rate much higher than average, “…a 200 percent […]