Yahoo stops offering AOL map service

Andrea Orr

PALO ALTO: Internet media company Yahoo! Inc Thursday said it has stopped

offering AOL Time Warner Inc's popular MapQuest service on its site, and instead

has built its own service offering consumers driving directions and street

locaters.

Yahoo, which is reviewing all its services to see how it can make more money

from them, said it decided it made sense to bring its maps technology in-house,

so it could better integrate it with other site features such as Yellow Pages.

Yahoo denied suggestions by a number of analysts that Yahoo may have dropped

AOL after being unable to agree on licensing terms, or that it was seeking to

limit the reach of its rival AOL. Yahoo has offered MapQuest on its site for the

past four years, however terms of its licensing deal with AOL have never been

disclosed.

In an interview, Andrew Braccia, director of business development for Yahoo

listings, said Yahoo spent the second half of last year building its own maps

service, which is similar in design to AOL's MapQuest. He said people who use

the popular service are not likely to notice much difference.

Although the maps service on Yahoo is free, it is widely recognized as an

important feature that brings people to the site. Jupiter Media Metrix said that

Yahoo Maps was in January, the second most popular map site on the Internet with

11.2 million users, behind MapQuest itself.

In addition to the total traffic numbers, the maps service is regarded as one

of the "stickier" features on Yahoo, that keeps consumers coming back.

The service instantly locates an address on a map and provides driving

directions, which many drivers find preferable to negotiating a paper map at the

steering wheel.

"I never go to a new destination without checking it," said analyst

Corcoran, explaining the value of the service. However he said Yahoo was still

not in a position to charge money for the service, since other comparable

services were available elsewhere on the Internet for free.

Yahoo said it had no immediate plans to charge for the service, but said

would work to make it more usable to consumers in a way that might over time

attract more traffic. AOL, which licenses MapQuest to more than 1,400 business

partners, said it did not expect the loss of Yahoo as a partner to have a

significant impact on the business.

The company does not disclose how much money it makes from MapQuest.