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Yahoo puts ads on cellphone home page

Yahoo Inc, owner of the most-visited US Web site, will start showing ads on the mobile version of its site in 18 countries to generate more revenue from users of wireless phones and devices.

Consumers clicking on ads will be able to call companies directly or get more information by connecting to advertisers' Web sites, Yahoo said today in a statement. Intel Corp, PepsiCo Inc and Nissan Motor Co are among the companies buying ads.

Advertising will help fund new mobile phone services, said Marco Boerries, a senior vice president at the company.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo also plans to sell more ads on wireless carriers' services. The company in November agreed to sell spots that appear on Vodafone Group Plc phones in the UK

"We're all trying to dramatically increase the percentage of users that use mobile services," Boerries said in an interview. "We're going to make sure there's easy access to our mobile services."

Yahoo will make the announcement at the 3GSM World Congress, a convention for mobile phone companies in Barcelona, Spain.

Shares of Yahoo fell US$0.34 to US$29.74 on Feb. 9 in NASDAQ Stock Market trading. They have risen 16 percent this year.

There were 251 million mobile phones sold in the third quarter of last year, compared with 59.1 million personal computers, said Gartner Inc, a research firm in Stamford, Connecticut. Yahoo, Google Inc and Microsoft Corp are starting services to capture the attention of cellphone users.

The ads will appear on Yahoo's mobile home page, spokeswoman Nicole Leverich said. The company may consider expanding them to more pages in the future, she said.

The advertising rate will depend on how many times an ad is shown, Leverich said. Ads can be targeted by country.

Yahoo started showing graphical ads on its mobile-phone pages in the US in November. A month before that, the company started a test of ads next to search results in the US and UK.
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