IAR Bits and Bytes

Yahoo Starts Premium AP Archive

Yahoo continues its strategy of adding subscriptions services, announcing the rollout of a paid service for archived articles from the Associated Press.

The searchable archive will have over a million AP stories going back to 1998. The premium articles are listed below Yahoo News search results. Each AP story more than 15 days old costs users $1.50 to access. More recent stories will continue to be free.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Yahoo offers articles from a variety of news sources, including Reuters, The New York Times, Forbes.com, Dow Jones, and TheStreet.com. Since May, Yahoo News has offered archived articles from the Times for $2.95 each.

Since coming on board in April 2001, Yahoo chief executive Terry Semel has remade Yahoo into a more diverse, less ad-dependent company. In the last quarter, listings and fees represented 34 percent of the company’s revenues, up 124 percent from a year ago. Last week, he said Yahoo would end the year with 2 million customers for its premium services, which now include job listings from HotJobs, auctions, and beefed-up email services. By 2005, Semel said he expected the company to have 10 million paying customers.

NetIQ Rolls Out WebTrends for BEA

As part of a shift to more specialized Web analytics offerings, NetIQ has rolled out WebTrends services packages geared to BEA’s WebLogic Server and WebLogic Portal.

The products tweak NetIQ’s WebTrends analytics software or hosted service for easier installation, and gear them specifically to WebLogic. Also, the package includes consulting for enterprise customers with large, complicated Web site deployments.

“Essentially, what we’ve found is corporate Web sites are getting more complicated,” said Barry Parshall, group product manager for WebTrends. “Organizations, especially enterprises, are wanting more complete solutions.”

Parshall said NetIQ plans a series of product launches geared to specific organizations, including analytics for portals or e-commerce sites, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach.

WebTrends competes with the likes of WebSideStory’s HitBox in the analytics market, which researcher Aberdeen Group estimates was worth $372 million in 2001.

OneStat Targets High-End Analytics Market

OneStat.com, an Amsterdam-based Web analytics company, announced the release of analytics products aimed at medium-and large-sized enterprises.

The OneStat Platinum and OneStat Enterprise services offer the usual array of Web site visitor information, including visitor segmentation and trend and campaign analysis. Both products are aimed at the high end of the market, like NetIQ’s WebTrends product for BEA customers.

The company said it hoped to differentiate its analytics products in a crowded market by being more cost efficient, boasting the OneStat’s services cost much less than similar high-end offerings like WebTrends, HitBox Enterprise, and Nedstat SiteStat.

OneStat boasts over 50,000 Web sites use its analytics products worldwide, with the company having a reseller network spread across 25 countries.