The venerable business-data site Yahoo Finance is getting a massive overhaul, its biggest redesign in a decade, as the site adds personal finance, video, social and other components while reducing clutter with a lot fewer ads. The redesign is to be unveiled today at the Yahoo Finance Invest event in New York City.
Changes include more video programming, a new homepage, personal portfolios of stocks, a customizable dock for easy access to key data, more streamlined layouts for company quote pages, better tracking of industry sectors and industry segments, and a new Compare mode to better do side-by-side evaluations.
“We’re really focused on back to the basics,” said Tapan Bhat, the site’s general manager and president, in an interview. “How do we help (audiences) grow their wealth? One of the issues we have is most people don’t know the depth and breadth of what we already have.”
Some of the new additions leverage the August acquisition of Commonstock, a social platform oriented toward retail investors. The company also has revamped its video offerings, a move announced in September, with a slate of four new shows, a new production studio and other improvements. Yahoo Finance’s Closing Bell show added co-anchor Josh Lipton on Sept. 18.
Despite its Web 1.0 roots, the site continues to be highly popular, attracting 90 million regular users, according to Bhat. But as the site plows through its 27th year, it was well due for a redesign.
One key addition will be more personal-finance information, like tips on finding the best rates on credit cards, mortgages, or savings accounts. That expansion beyond investing was influenced by Bhat’s previous stop as an executive at NerdWallet, which began as a blog offering rate-comparison tools and evolved into a broader fintech offering appealing to younger audiences.
Bhat said Yahoo Finance’s new Compare function is another important change, especially for regular users trying to simultaneously look at multiple stocks’ performance. The new function will greatly simplify and automate a process that previously required a clunky workaround.
“It totally has been a pain for folks,’ Bhat said. “This is something people have done by downloading the data and dropping it into a spreadsheet.”
Other bits are designed to spotlight the day’s most useful bits of data, culled from the tsunami of information the market generates every day, with a carousel of short lists including the most active stocks, biggest gainers and losers, analysts’ strong buy recommendations, and even a screening-generated list of undervalued growth stocks.
The reduction in ads on the page – Bhat said it has been cut 40 percent – has greatly reduced clutter and improved usability, Bhat said. But slightly counterintuitively, it also has actually increased revenue per ad significantly.
“We have cut down the number of ads, but have seen ad clickthrough and performance go up four times, and have seen effective CPM go up significantly,” Bhat said. “We are focused on premium. When you have premium users, you need (to offer) a premium experience.”
Yahoo Finance, like the other Yahoo verticals, was acquired by alternative asset management giant Apollo in 2021, part of the Verizon sell-off of online properties it had acquired a few years earlier.
Bhat joined about 18 months ago, after that deal. Despite the long gap between updates, Yahoo Finance remains the most popular broadly accessible business-information site. Bhat said the user base includes more than 1 million investment professionals, and more than 8 million users with portfolios worth than $1 million each.
And though he wouldn’t come right out and say it, it seems likely that Yahoo Finance’s subscription service will also get a makeover soon.
“That hasn’t yet been updated,” Bhat said. “We’re just getting started in creating the most useful guide for people’s finances. We are taking care of the first things first with this revamp.”