Credit goes to Joe Pompeo for noticing certain Bloomberg stories appear on Yahoo Finance.  Then a Yahoo representative confirmed in an email that what Pompeo had seen wasn’t a mistake or experiment.

The Yahoo spokesperson wrote, "Yahoo! has added Bloomberg.com content to its financial news portfolio.  As the Internet’s #1 destination for financial news and information, Yahoo! Finance is committed to providing our audience with the most comprehensive coverage of the day’s market news."

And this deal should indeed help in that respect.  Bloomberg is a respected name when it comes to news, after all, and some Yahoo Finance users are bound to appreciate the extra source of information.

Plus, this arrangement makes Yahoo Finance look somewhat important, since Bloomberg execs presumably didn’t dislike the idea of aligning their brand with it.

In somewhat related news, a post on the Google Finance Blog took another shot at promoting the Google Domestic Trends tool yesterday.

"Unfortunate" isn’t at all the same as "disastrous," of course.  Yahoo Finance didn’t rely on daily or monthly updates to stay ahead of the competition, and Schultz isn’t a household name, so the average user shouldn’t even notice the change.

Schultz spent about five years at Yahoo, however, and was also head of the Yahoo Real Estate Business, meaning insiders are almost sure to see repercussions.

Pageonce, Schultz’s new employer, noted in a press release, "During his tenure at Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance doubled its market share attracting more than 40 million unique visitors according to Comscore.  He led its business and content strategy, business development and strategic partnerships which included relationships with Intuit, Fidelity Investments, Dow Jones, ScottTrade, Bankrate and Bloomberg.com."

Furthermore, "With Yahoo! Real Estate, Schultz helped lead the site from the #10 to the #2 real estate destination on the Web, was named one of the 100 most influential leaders in the real estate industry by Inman News in 2009, and architected a strategic partnership with Zillow.com in 2010."

Anyway, at Pageonce, which calls itself a "personal finance assistant," Schultz will act as COO.  Hat tip goes to Kara Swisher.

It’s been nearly nine months since Google launched its finance site upon the Internet world, and it still has yet to make so much as a dent into Yahoo’s lead in this particular market.

Back in December, Google unveiled a series of new features aimed at creating buzz for its finance site, and also designed to increase functionality to make the offering more on par with the services that Yahoo offers to its users. The changes were met with praise, but the results haven’t been indicative of any type of momentum shift from Yahoo to Google.

Nearly three months later, Google has rolled out even more changes to Google Finance:

Each day you’ll find a great assortment of finance-related videos from leading sources such as CBS, Forbes, Reuters, and even fun ones from WallStrip on the Google Finance homepage. Enjoy these videos and stay up-to-date on the latest financial market activities.

Can’t wait to see how your stock performs when the company announces earnings in extended hours trading? Company charts now include prices from the extended hour markets, so you can view stock performance at any time.

Since you might not like having your own portfolio stocks ordered alphabetically, there’s now a way to choose the order with a very easy-to-use drag and drop interface.

Again, the changes seem geared toward bringing Google more in line with the types of services that Yahoo offers; there’s nothing really innovative here – and perhaps that’s the underlying dilemma facing Google Finance. Honestly, has Google gotten this far as a company by trying to be more like Yahoo?

Yahoo Finance has been the dominant leader for online financial information for quite some time, and even well-known offline publications, and competition from Google, has not displaced it.

In May 2006 during the Syndicate Conference, Yahoo launched its Finance Badges, which permit site publishers to display content from Yahoo Finance directly on their blogs or sites. Developers have continued work on them, to the point where Yahoo Finance wants to investigate more of their capabilities when it comes to advertising.

Katie Hartnack Beltramini, Yahoo! Finance Product Manager, posted a call on the Yahoo Publisher Network blog for willing testers to help them out with the badges:

The trade is two months on a publisher’s site in exchange for 24 hours on Yahoo Finance. Since Yahoo gets to pick the time and place for its end of the bargain, that could either be very good (a day of promotion during the end of a fiscal quarter for publicly traded companies) or very bad (two words: Christmas week.)

An agile and clever site publisher could capitalize nicely on 24 hours of Yahoo Finance promotion. If the site has 200,000 monthly page views already, they are doing something right already, so building on Yahoo’s reciprocal push should be an attainable prospect.

Yahoo did report some softer financial results due to weakness in its financial and automotive advertising in their third quarter. Enticing more people to place Finance badges with advertsing on them would increase the reach of those ads, and could help Yahoo boost its Finance ad sales with the expansion of display outlets.

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Gambling On Upgrades With Yahoo Finance

We are delighted to see the unveiling of Yahoo Finance Badges, only a couple of months after we broke the news about them during the May 2006 Syndicate Conference. The Badges and some other updates to the market leading Yahoo Finance have been unveiled for their users.

Reuters reported on the changes at Yahoo Finance, noting the Badges release and a couple of other moves made by the Yahoo team. One of the changes involved the message boards, used by people to discuss stocks and their attendant news.

Yahoo discussed the Finance Message Boards and highlighted four changes made to them. For one, authors can no longer be found by searching for a name as a keyword.

Instead, one can use the Advanced Search option in the search bar to find posts “Authored by” a given username. Also, clicking the View Message link next to an Author’s message will display all of that author’s posts.

Messages will be grouped by Topics now instead of appearing in chronological order. Topics with the most recent reply will be the ones that appear at the top of the Topics list.

Navigation has been tweaked so that the Previous and Next links work differently. From the post:

Recommendations have been replaced with the five-star rating system used on other properties like Yahoo News. By rating each message read, users can help other visitors find better quality posts while moderating down the less useful ones.

On Yahoo Finance, users should now find a more interactive experience in the stock charts. The report said a full screen stock chart will allow people to view long-term historical stock data and events. Google Finance made a version of that functionality a feature when it launched earlier this year.

Reuters also cited Yahoo Finance General Manager Peggy White on the future of Badges beyond financial content. Yahoo has other Badges in the works, to permit the placement of Yahoo content like news, sports, and entertainment on blogs and websites.

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Bloggers and site publishers will be able to add badges from Yahoo! Finance to their sites at no cost. These badges can be configured to carry the quotes, news, and charts of the companies chosen by the blogger for display.

Yahoo! posted this statement about the new offering:

New content badges from Yahoo! Finance bring access to financial data to the blogging and small publisher masses..

- Financial content to web sites enhance overall value to your users
- Quotes, charts and news update automatically- no maintenance from web master
- sourced from the leader in financial information Yahoo! Finance
- And…it’s FREE to you and your users

At Syndicate, attendees can visit the Yahoo! Finance booth for a demonstration.

UPDATE!: More information courtesy of Yahoo appears here in our exclusive article.

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