Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

From my Forbes blog:

Yahoo wants app developers to know it really, really likes them. But even if they return the affection, will that be enough to turn the company around?

Today, at its Mobile Developer Conference in San Francisco, the Internet company rolled out a suite of new products and services aimed at helping mobile app developers make money. It’s the latest and most aggressive move in a two-year effort to prove that it has fully joined the mobile revolution.

More than 1,000 mobile app developers gathered to hear how the still struggling Internet company plans to help them acquire, analyze and make money from users through advertising, app purchases, and other means. Yahoo billed the conference as the first annual, but it’s an outgrowth of an annual conference held for years the mobile analytics and ad network Flurry, which Yahoo bought last year. That was clear when Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf got somewhat more enthusiastic cheers from the audience than Mayer when he was introduced.

Yahoo offers the software tools–including a way for apps to embed in their software Yahoo search, video and so-called native ads that match the context where they’re running, as well as a new analytics dashboard from Flurry–for free. In return, it hopes the apps, 630,000 of which use Flurry’s software, will run its ads, for which they get 60% of the revenues. Yahoo hopes that will vastly expand the places its ads run, especially on mobile devices where people increasingly spend most of their time and, increasingly, money online. That in turn could make Yahoo more attractive to advertisers. …

Read more details in the full post.