Why regionalised Yahoo! portals make sense

Yahoo! has been rolling out regionalised and localised versions of its portals for years.

This year it rolled out portals in emerging markets like South Africa and Romania. The multinational online publisher also has a presence in key emerging market BRIC countries, including Brazil, Russia, India and China. It does not have a dedicated presence in any other part of Africa, besides South Africa and some North African countries.

The veteran internet player, the old man of the internet, serves hundreds of millions of page impressions a month. Daily, it says it serves 15-billion ad impressions. That’s a boat-load of inventory.

The question is: Why are they rolling out these regional portals on a globalised platform like the web? Well, the answer is simple: Money.

It’s because, on a global stage, Yahoo! is not monetising its billions and billions of adverts effectively at all. It can’t. Not unless it has localised pages in markets outside of just the US, Canada, Japan and Europe.

But that’s just one half of the equation. It also needs a local advertising agency to sell its massive audience, specifically the audience in the regional market in question (regardless of what Yahoo! pages they’re visiting). In South Africa, Yahoo! has been working with Apurimac Media.

This sales partnership has clearly been working very well. There’s demand for inventory on all of Yahoo!’s properties. Yahoo! has 2.6-million users across its sites from South Africa (300 000 unique views per day from SA).

So, sales force? Check. Localisation? A few local feeds and services… Check.

Now Yahoo! can do what portals with tons of traffic do very easily. It can shift this traffic wherever it wants.

Microsoft’s regionalised MSN offerings in Africa have been showing good results. Last month, MSN had just shy of 1.6-million unique visitors and 25-million pageviews from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria combined. You can generate meaningful revenue from this. “Howzit MSN“, MSN’s South African portal run by Kagiso Media, shows how valuable this business could be.

Now, wait for Yahoo! to start automatically redirecting those two-million-plus South African users to the local portal in the first quarter of 2012. The numbers make sense. Right now, Yahoo! needs all the extra sales revenue it can get (especially from international operations).

But here is something else to think about. These regional portals are money spinners because they tap into regional internet markets, but how much of that advertising revenue stays in the country to keep building the regional internet industries?