With Yahoo! Personal Finance, anyone has access to free finance tools and how-to guides for various financial areas, such as tax planning, budgeting, real estate planning and personal savings. The site will feature 48 how-to guides and 66 financial calculators in total.
The new site provides users with a collection of financial centres that cover nine areas of personal finance, ranging from banking and budgeting to retirement. The content of the site will come from various different sources: there are currently 25 licensed content providers listed for Yahoo! Personal Finance, including the likes of Consumer Reports, CNNMoney, The Motley Fool, Kiplinger, Smart Money and the Wall Street Journal.
The Yahoo! users themselves will play an important part in the content structure of the site: the site editors will select from a pool of user answers to fill in a section of the site.
Yahoo! decided to widen its focus in order to include more simple money matters - a decision that came after they realized that people are more interested in balancing their checkbooks than juggling their stock portfolios.
Yahoo! Finance general manager Peggy White informed reporters in New York that this redevelopment project was undertaken due to the high demand from advertisers to reach Yahoo!'s audience whilst in the process of making life-changing decisions.
The new design has taken a considerable period of time to develop. The final site design was only rolled out after numerous research sessions with users and whiteboard sessions with advertisers.
This image shows the Yahoo! Personal Finance home page.
By reaching out to a broader audience, Yahoo! hopes to lure in more advertisers and accelerate recently dwindling revenue growth that has lagged far behind the pace of the world's leading search engine, Google.
But while Yahoo! may battle constantly with Google for the position of the most visited search engine, they can certainly offer more in terms of finance services. Indeed, Yahoo! holds a huge advantage over Google in this area. With 9.6 million US visitors in December, Yahoo!'s finance section ranked second, just behind MSN Money. However, Google's finance section didn't draw enough traffic to show up on Media Metrix's listings.
