yahoosports: It’s a Mad, Mad World.  The Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge with Yahoo SportsBy Ken Fuchs, VP/Group Lead Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Product PartnershipsWe felt the rush of the buzzer beaters, Cinderellas and win-or-go-home, but that just wasn’t enough for the annual feast that is the Tourney.  This year, we decided to ratchet up the heat by teaming with Quicken Loans and Warren Buffett to try and give someone a billion dollars.  If you’re one of the first 15 million people to sign up for the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge with Yahoo Sports by Thursday, March 20 at 1:00 a.m. as an eligible player and predict the winner of every single tournament game, you could be America’s next billionaire.  Don’t worry — even if you blow it on the first game of the tourney, you could still have a shot at $2 million of guaranteed prizes.  See official Challenge Rules for more info.To help you with those perfect picks, Yahoo Sports will provide up-to-the-second news, data, advice and research from our award-winning Bracketologists Pat Forde, Brad Evans and Jeff Eisenberg. You can get all that, plus fill out your bracket, play against your friends, track the games, follow your school, get instant reactions and enter the Challenge right from the Yahoo Sports apps on iOS and Android Smartphones. While you watch, you can also share your own shining moments by creating Loops with special effects and captions.Finally – if you really want to be a player — join the Celebrity Bracket Challenge with four All-Stars and former college phenoms (including one national champion) — Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Paul George or Chris Paul.  They will have pools only in the Celebrity Bracket Challenge on Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick’em, so now is your chance to take on the pros.Selection Sunday is less than two weeks away, so it’s time to start researching tournament trends, bracket busters and this year’s hottest teams.  What would you do with a billion dollars?  Join the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge with Yahoo Sports and start dreaming. High-res

yahoosports:

It’s a Mad, Mad World.  The Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge with Yahoo Sports

By Ken Fuchs, VP/Group Lead Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Product Partnerships

We felt the rush of the buzzer beaters, Cinderellas and win-or-go-home, but that just wasn’t enough for the annual feast that is the Tourney.  This year, we decided to ratchet up the heat by teaming with Quicken Loans and Warren Buffett to try and give someone a billion dollars.  

If you’re one of the first 15 million people to sign up for the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge with Yahoo Sports by Thursday, March 20 at 1:00 a.m. as an eligible player and predict the winner of every single tournament game, you could be America’s next billionaire.  Don’t worry — even if you blow it on the first game of the tourney, you could still have a shot at $2 million of guaranteed prizes.  See official Challenge Rules for more info.

To help you with those perfect picks, Yahoo Sports will provide up-to-the-second news, data, advice and research from our award-winning Bracketologists Pat Forde, Brad Evans and Jeff Eisenberg. You can get all that, plus fill out your bracket, play against your friends, track the games, follow your school, get instant reactions and enter the Challenge right from the Yahoo Sports apps on iOS and Android Smartphones. While you watch, you can also share your own shining moments by creating Loops with special effects and captions.

Finally – if you really want to be a player — join the Celebrity Bracket Challenge with four All-Stars and former college phenoms (including one national champion) — Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Paul George or Chris Paul.  They will have pools only in the Celebrity Bracket Challenge on Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick’em, so now is your chance to take on the pros.
Selection Sunday is less than two weeks away, so it’s time to start researching tournament trends, bracket busters and this year’s hottest teams.  

What would you do with a billion dollars?  Join the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge with Yahoo Sports and start dreaming.

Happy Birthday Yahoo!

It’s been an amazing 19 years, and I’m so incredibly proud of what Yahoo is today.

Whether you’re searching the web, sending email, checking the weather, sharing photos, watching videos, getting sports scores, tumbling, checking stocks or reading the news, we strive to make your daily habits inspiring and entertaining.

Thank you for inspiring us and coming to Yahoo everyday. 

- David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo

Introducing Yahoo Gemini

The first unified ad marketplace for mobile search and native advertising

By Jay Rossiter, SVP of Cloud Platform Group, and Adam Cahan, SVP of Mobile and Emerging Products

When advertising appears seamlessly and naturally, it creates a more enjoyable experience for users, increases engagement and improves performance for advertisers. This is why we continue to work hard to roll out new, more innovative native ad formats on Yahoo. Native advertising is the sponsored twin of content  — while the ads are clearly marked, they look and act just like the other stories on the page. 

Today, we are excited to introduce Yahoo Gemini, the first unified marketplace for mobile search and native advertising. With Yahoo Gemini, advertisers get the performance and ease of search, combined with the scale and creativity of native advertising.  By bringing the two together, advertisers can now buy, manage and optimize their mobile search and native ad spend in one place — driving greater performance and higher impact for their businesses and brands.

And to make it even easier for advertisers, Yahoo Gemini is available through our existing self-service buying platform, Yahoo Ad Manager. 

Mobile is the fastest-growing market segment, and we have innovated how our users communicate, consume content and search for information across multiple devices. We are equally committed to building products that simplify the buying process and improve the experience for advertisers.  Yahoo Gemini is the latest way we are helping advertisers reach millions of people directly on their mobile devices with smart, integrated, multi-channel campaigns. 

More Transparency For U.S. National Security Requests

You may have heard that the U.S. government issued a new policy last week that lets Internet providers disclose more about the U.S. national security requests they receive. Yahoo and other tech companies fought vigorously in court for the right to share such information. We’re pleased that the Department of Justice has embraced the compelling need for greater disclosure.

In light of the new policy, we’re updating the disclosures we provided to you in Yahoo’s first global transparency report last September with more detailed information about the number of U.S. national security requests we receive. As we said then, the number of Yahoo accounts specified in global government data requests comprised less than one one-hundredth of one percent (<.01%) of our worldwide user base for the reporting period.

The U.S. government limits how we can report its national security requests. For example, such requests must be reported in ranges, rather than in exact numbers, and information about requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) must be delayed six months. (You can read the government’s reporting limitations here. We’ve adopted the disclosure option that lets us provide the most information to you about both the type and number of requests we get.)

The numbers reported below represent the number of U.S. national security requests received by Yahoo that were effective during the reporting period and the number of accounts about which data was sought. This is the maximum amount of detail that the U.S. government allows.

Reporting period: January 1 – June 30, 2013

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Reporting period: July 1 – December 31, 2013

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FISA Requests are compulsory legal process reviewed and approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that require companies to disclose information about their users in national security investigations.

  • FISA Requests for Disclosure of Content may be used to get content that users create, communicate, and store on or through our services. This could include, for example, words in an email or instant message, photos on Flickr, Yahoo Address Book or Calendar entries and similar kinds of information.
  • FISA Requests for Disclosure of Non-Content Data (NCD) are limited to NCD such as alternate e-mail address, name, location, and IP address, login details, billing information, and other transactional information (e.g., “to,” “from,” and “date” fields from email headers).

NSLs are national security requests approved by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that require companies to disclose information such as the names, addresses and length of service of their users. They may not be used to request content.

The Number of Accounts is typically larger than the number of users and accounts involved because an individual user may have multiple accounts that were specified in one or more requests, and if a request specified an account that does not exist, that nonexistent account would nevertheless be included in our count.

What’s next?

As always, Yahoo will continue to protect the privacy of our users and to ensure our ability to defend it. This includes advocating strenuously for meaningful reform around government surveillance, demanding that government requests be made through lawful means and for lawful purposes, and fighting government requests that we deem unclear, improper, overbroad, or unlawful.

Yahoo updates its full global transparency report every six months and will update it again in the next few months. We’re also pleased to share with you that our colleagues at tumblr released their first global transparency report today too.

By Ron Bell, General Counsel, and Aaron Altschuler, Associate General Counsel, Law Enforcement and Security

Important Security Update for Yahoo Mail Users

Security attacks are unfortunately becoming a more regular occurrence. Recently, we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts. Upon discovery, we took immediate action to protect our users, prompting them to reset passwords on impacted accounts.

Based on our current findings, the list of usernames and passwords that were used to execute the attack was likely collected from a third-party database compromise. We have no evidence that they were obtained directly from Yahoo’s systems. Our ongoing investigation shows that malicious computer software used the list of usernames and passwords to access Yahoo Mail accounts. The information sought in the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent emails.

What we’re doing to protect our users

  • We are resetting passwords on impacted accounts and we are using second sign-in verification to allow users to re-secure their accounts. Impacted users will be prompted (if not, already) to change their password and may receive an email notification or an SMS text if they have added a mobile number to their account.

  • We are working with federal law enforcement to find and prosecute the perpetrators responsible for this attack.

  • We have implemented additional measures to block attacks against Yahoo’s systems.

What you can do to help keep your accounts secure

In addition to adopting better password practices by changing your password regularly and using different variations of symbols and characters, users should never use the same password on multiple sites or services.  Using the same password on multiple sites or services makes users particularly vulnerable to these types of attacks.

We regret this has happened and want to assure our users that we take the security of their data very seriously.

For more information, please check our Customer Care help page.

By Jay Rossiter, SVP, Platforms and Personalization Products

UPDATE: Yahoo to Live Stream Video Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2013 Earnings on Yahoo Finance on January 28, 2014

Audience Invited to Submit Questions for Consideration in Advance

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) will discuss the company’s financial results for the quarter and year ended December 31, 2013 via live stream video. In addition to analyst questions asked live during the event, Yahoo will accept questions in advance of the live stream sent via email to yhooearnings@yahoo.com.

Questions received before noon Pacific/3:00 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, January 28, 2014, will be considered for the live stream with Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer and CFO Ken Goldman.

Q4 AND FULL YEAR LIVE STREAM DETAILS:

WHEN: Tuesday, January 28 at 2:00 p.m. Pacific/5:00 p.m. Eastern

WHERE: The live stream will be broadcast from Yahoo’s Sunnyvale studio and will be available exclusively on Yahoo Finance at finance.yahoo.com. The video will be archived after the event at investor.yahoo.net and will be available for 90 days following the broadcast.

marketr: Introducing Tumblr Sponsored Posts Powered by Yahoo Advertising: Creative Storytelling Meets Leading Technology We’re kicking off 2014 with a major upgrade to our advertising platform: Tumblr Sponsored Posts Powered by Yahoo Advertising. That’s right, now the things you promote on Tumblr can take advantage of the marketing finesse that Yahoo technology has to offer. The big deal: Tailor your audience: Use gender and location to deliver your content with accuracy.  Only pay for engagement: You’re only charged for Reblogs, Likes, follows, or clicks made directly from the Sponsored Post itself.  Remove the guesswork: Try out different creative approaches, and we’ll narrow your campaign down to the one that performs best. Measure the results: Our analytics tools now report demographic data.  The power of a Sponsored Post: 60% of users who’ve seen Sponsored Posts find the content fun, engaging, and high quality. 70% of consumers perceive a brand more favorably after seeing a Sponsored Post. 50% of users who saw Sponsored Posts researched the sponsor afterward. We’re excited to introduce these enhanced capabilities to the striking creative work and native advertising experience that define sponsorships on Tumblr. This is where advertising is actually fun, and we plan on keeping it that way. Ready to get started? Visit www.tumblr.com/business. &lt;3 Source: Nielsen/Tumblr Brand Tracker, 2013

marketr:

Introducing Tumblr Sponsored Posts Powered by Yahoo Advertising: Creative Storytelling Meets Leading Technology

We’re kicking off 2014 with a major upgrade to our advertising platform: Tumblr Sponsored Posts Powered by Yahoo Advertising. That’s right, now the things you promote on Tumblr can take advantage of the marketing finesse that Yahoo technology has to offer.

The big deal:

  • Tailor your audience: Use gender and location to deliver your content with accuracy. 
  • Only pay for engagement: You’re only charged for Reblogs, Likes, follows, or clicks made directly from the Sponsored Post itself. 
  • Remove the guesswork: Try out different creative approaches, and we’ll narrow your campaign down to the one that performs best.
  • Measure the results: Our analytics tools now report demographic data. 

The power of a Sponsored Post:

  • 60% of users who’ve seen Sponsored Posts find the content fun, engaging, and high quality.
  • 70% of consumers perceive a brand more favorably after seeing a Sponsored Post.
  • 50% of users who saw Sponsored Posts researched the sponsor afterward.

We’re excited to introduce these enhanced capabilities to the striking creative work and native advertising experience that define sponsorships on Tumblr. This is where advertising is actually fun, and we plan on keeping it that way.

Ready to get started? Visit www.tumblr.com/business.

<3

Source: Nielsen/Tumblr Brand Tracker, 2013

Introducing the new Yahoo Advertising

Today we are announcing a unified approach to digital advertising that only Yahoo can deliver – across premium and audience-focused display, native and search advertising.

The online advertising world today is fragmented, difficult to navigate, and not always customer-friendly. For advertisers to get the reach, targeting, and ad effectiveness they want, they have to work with multiple publishers, ad networks and exchanges, demand-side platforms, and analytics vendors, among others. And still, advertisers are left with limited ability to measure and optimize the performance of their campaigns.

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We think there is a better way. The new Yahoo Advertising includes a comprehensive suite of web, mobile, and video ad products across native, audience, and premium display, which are accessible through a new buying platform. These products are supported by Yahoo’s data and analytical tools, with insights into the daily digital habits of more than 800 million people worldwide.

What’s New:

  • Tumblr Sponsored Posts now powered by Yahoo Advertising
  • Yahoo Audience Ads — a better way to buy ads targeted to specific audiences
  • Yahoo Ad Manager and Ad Manager Plus — a new buying platform that gives advertisers direct, hands-on access to Yahoo’s advertising products
  • Yahoo Ad Exchange — a new global ad marketplace that provides premium publishers with more visibility and control over advertising on their sites.

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Native Advertising

Yahoo Stream Ads and Yahoo Image Ads offer native ads that are organic and as engaging as the stories around them. Today, we are excited to announce that Tumblr Sponsored Posts are now powered by Yahoo Advertising. The ads are a more natural, seamless part of the reader’s experience, leading to higher impact for advertisers.

Display Advertising

We’re introducing the new Yahoo Audience Ads, a better way to buy ads targeted to specific audiences. Yahoo Audience Ads deliver the right messages to the right users across Yahoo and other high-quality sites with the scale and targeting precision of real-time programmatic buying. Expanding the services previously available as Genome, Yahoo Audience Ads offer optimized, data-driven ad buying with enhanced analytics. Advertisers have access to a comprehensive set of audience data, combining Yahoo data with advertiser data and third-party data, all usable on an extended pool of high-quality inventory.

Yahoo Audience Ads complement our existing premium display offering, Yahoo Premium Ads. Yahoo Premium Ads offer the largest digital advertising canvas for brand and performance advertisers on the web. Run a brand campaign on the Yahoo homepage, sponsor March Madness on Yahoo Sports, or run premium video ads on Yahoo Screen. Yahoo Premium Ads ensure the right audiences are reached on brand-safe and contextually relevant sites.  

A Simplified Platform

These new native and display ads are now available to large and small advertisers through a new simplified platform, Yahoo Ad Manager. Yahoo Ad Manager gives advertisers direct, hands-on access to Yahoo’s advertising products. Yahoo Stream Ads, Yahoo Image Ads and Tumblr Sponsored Posts powered by Yahoo Advertising are available today through a simple user interface that helps advertisers get ads online in a matter of minutes, with insights and analytics built in.

Yahoo Ad Manager Plus is an extension of Yahoo Ad Manager for larger advertisers to plan, execute and optimize complex display ad campaigns directly, giving them greater control over the performance of their ads on Yahoo and third-party programmatic inventory. Many features of Yahoo Audience Ads and Premium Ads can be accessed through Yahoo Ad Manager Plus, available later in Q1. Yahoo offers managed services through Yahoo Audience Ads and Yahoo Premium Ads for advertisers who want custom audience definition, richer campaign measurement and insights, access to exclusive inventory, varied pricing options, and full-service optimization.

Yahoo Ad Exchange is a new global ad marketplace launching in Q1 that provides premium publishers with more visibility and control over advertising on their sites. Continuing the evolution of programmatic advertising, the Yahoo Ad Exchange upgrades the powerful services that our partners know from Right Media with a higher-quality marketplace and an enhanced platform featuring payment clearing, advanced inventory and demand controls, and flexible private marketplaces.

The Importance of Insights

These new Yahoo Advertising products offer brands and advertisers the most comprehensive ways in the market to accurately target campaigns, utilize data and insights from Yahoo, advertisers, and third parties. Because Yahoo is at the center of people’s daily habits across search, communications, media, and video, we can offer uniquely powerful insights on consumer behavior.

We are committed to driving innovation in ad technology across the industry. Yahoo Advertising is our investment in building better advertising tools to create engaging experiences that users enjoy and advertisers embrace.

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