Yahoo Preps Customised, Mobile Livestand Newspaper

Yahoo has revealed it is preparing to launch Livestand, a personalised, digital news service for tablet computers and smartphones.

Livestand pushes fresh content from the company’s own Sports, News, Finance, Flickr and omg!, as well as content from third-party publishers and advertisers, to Yahoo users based on their expressed interests. The service will also encompass citizens’ journalism content from the Yahoo Contributor Network.

Location, Time And Behavioural Preferences

Yahoo is preparing the service as it seeks to generate meaningful display ad revenues and keep users coming to its various and sundry properties. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz may discuss Livestand at Mobile World Congress next week.

The company will also use behavioural preferences to fine-tune the personalised content, which will be piped to users also based on their location and the time of day. Readers will be able to access the content using touch gestures on tablets.

The users’ interests will be paired with similarly personalised ads, geared to “evoke the emotion of TV advertising with a highly-visual, magazine-like experience”, said Blake Irving, executive vice president and chief product officer for Yahoo. Publishers will be also able to charge for subscriptions, he added.

Why does the market need Livestand now? Irving explained that Yahoo believes that, while the use of tablets and smartphones is accelerating, digital media is lagging.

“Consumers can’t find the publications they buy off the newsstand and publishers and advertisers can’t reach the audiences they want to serve,” Irving said in a corporate blog post. “As the premier digital media company, we’re in a position to meet all of these needs.”

The notion that current digital content services on tablets are failing to reach audiences has spurred news purveyors such as The Daily, the new News Corp publication exclusive for the iPad; and Flipboard, a dedicated news reader. Moreover, reports surfaced in January that Google was courting publishers and advertisers to build out its own digital newsstand, leveraging its cloud-based infrastructure.

Yahoo’s Livestand is scheduled to launch to users of the iPad and Android tablets such as the Motorola Xoom, in the first half of 2011. Implementations for smartphones and PC Web browsers will follow.