• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 21, 2022

Marissa Mayer might have concerns that the value of search at her former employer -- specifically the platform Google Search -- continues to decline in value, but another former employer -- Yahoo, where she previously served as CEO -- made an announcement today to advance identity resolution, which could fix that problem.

One of the reasons is that Mayer might have seen the “quality of the internet” take a hit, she told Freakonomics.

In a podcast that ran last week, Mayer pointed to more ads serving on a search page, less relevant content, and an inability for marketers to analyze data to determine who gets served which ad.  

“When I started at Google, there were about 30 million web pages, so crawling them all and indexing them all was relatively straightforward,” Mayer said.

That number might sound huge, but it’s small in comparison to today's total, she said, estimating that now there are probably around a trillion URLs.

Mayer’s former employer Yahoo on Monday announced advances in identifying consumers to target ads as privacy measures kick in and marketers have less data to work with. Diminishing access to data is one factor driving brands to retail websites to purchase media.

Yahoo today announced five new interoperability partnerships for its Yahoo ConnectID solution.

The new partners supporting Yahoo ConnectID include Annalect’s Omni ID, Alliant, AdPredictive, ShareThis, and Tealium, as advertisers and publishers seek a privacy-first solution to driving campaign personalization, performance and measurement.  

When asked how ConnectID can add value to advertisers, a spokesperson said that Yahoo ConnectID increases the value of cookieless audiences. Consumer preferences, laws and partnerships are evolving, and it has become more challenging to understand and effectively monetize audiences.

The technology is built on differentiated, deterministic and omnichannel data sets, with scaled, opted-in, direct consumer relationships across mobile, desktop, search, and more. It integrates directly with other data management platforms (DMPs) and customer data platforms (CDPs) to ingest and activate against third-party data.

That interoperability enables Yahoo ConnectID to match partner ID-data for audience activation and measurement within Yahoo’s demand-side platform, Yahoo DSP, and fuels monetization benefits for users of Yahoo's supply-side platform, Yahoo SSP.

Fueled by both direct consumer relationships and partnerships, Yahoo ConnectID today reaches 167 million authenticated users in the U.S.