Yahoo to feed its own stock ticker service
Web giant will license a ticker service to outside companies after restructuring its previous deal with Reuters.
The alteration of Yahoo's longstanding relationship with Reuters will not affect the presence of Reuters' news headlines throughout Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News. Instead, Yahoo will use its direct links into the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq, the American Stock Exchange, and so on, to launch its own service called "Quotes from Yahoo Finance," which it plans to license to outside Web sites.
"This is just about our taking control of the data business ourselves and extending that to other platforms," said Craig Forman, Yahoo's vice president of information and finance.
Besides stock quotes, the new service also will provide charts and analytical tools. Forman added that the company signed up Forbes.com as a customer to provide a mutual-fund charting feature.
Forman declined to disclose licensing terms.
Reuters has been a presence on Yahoo for many years and remains a content partner of the Web portal. But the British news service has been scaling back the amount of information and content it distributes in hopes of bolstering its Web site and its business of selling proprietary financial systems.
Yahoo has made moves over the past few years to limit its dependency on Reuters, striking deals with major news organizations such as the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to provide headlines throughout Yahoo's general and financial news sections.
The decision to license its ticker service to outside companies is not surprising, given that Yahoo recently released a test version of its own desktop stock ticker service.