Flurry Chief Product Officer Prashant Fuloria unveils the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite
Flurry Chief Product Officer Prashant Fuloria unveils the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite

SAN FRANCISCO – Yahoo is offering a new suite of tools to help app developers build their businesses, as part of an effort to expand its own mobile advertising business.

yahoo_ydn_en-US_s_f_p_bestfit_developer-network_2xAt the company’s inaugural conference for mobile developers today, executives from the company announced a new Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite that helps developers measure how their software is used, monetize their users and promote their applications all in one package.

“It’s been a little under six months – in fact it has been 178 days – since Flurry joined Yahoo,” Flurry Chief Product Officer Prashant Fuloria said. “And since then, a number of people have been working very hard and very fast to bring together the best of Yahoo and the best of Flurry into one suite of products that can help you better measure, advertise, monetize and enhance your apps.”

Yahoo’s Flurry Analytics got a new user interface, along with a new Explorer feature that allows developers to easily measure how users of their apps behave. Developers can define events, like installing the app, or making a bet in a poker game, and then see how their users break down across age, region, gender and more characteristics. All of those queries can be run live from the Flurry Explorer dashboard in real time.

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A new Flurry Pulse tool allows app developers to easily share a package of that analytics data with outside partners. That may not seem like a whole lot, but it will allow developers to more easily work with measurement companies like ComScore to get better advertising rates, and compare themselves against other apps on the market. It’s launching in a developer preview today, and users will be able to send data from Pulse to ComScore, with more partners coming soon.

Screen Shot 2015-02-19 at 11.48.33 AMDevelopers who want to make money through ads in their apps will now get access to Yahoo’s Gemini native advertising system and Brightroll video ad marketplace through the same Flurry software development kit that powers the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite’s analytics tools. It’s an easy way for app makers to monetize their apps without having to include additional code from another advertising network like Google’s.

Yahoo is also expanding its mobile app install ad business with the suite’s Yahoo App Marketing system. It opens up the company’s Gemini mobile native advertising system to independent developers in the U.S., so they can promote their applications across any properties using Gemini, including Tumblr and Yahoo Sports. App install ads are a key driver of Facebook’s business on mobile, and Yahoo’s push in that arena will help it tap a growing segment of the mobile ad market.

Finally, developers who want to integrate web search into their apps can now add Yahoo’s search technology (along with its search advertising) for free. Applications that include Yahoo Search will get a cut when their users tap on advertisements included in results that come up.

All in all, the suite is a massive push from the Sunnyvale-based search company to expand its slice of the mobile market. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer revealed today that mobile revenue makes up a quarter of the company’s business, and these tools have a chance to grow that even further.

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