​Yahoo's new plan for building ad revenue

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo (YHOO) will try to harvest revenue from mobile applications outside its own crop of services as CEO Marissa Mayer scours the digital landscape for more growth opportunities.

The expansion is being attempted through a set of free tools that Yahoo announced Thursday during the company's inaugural conference for the makers of mobile applications.

As part of the toolkit, Yahoo is offering to distribute ads in other mobile apps besides its own. Yahoo also is trying to plant its search engine inside other apps so it can display ads alongside the results.

Yahoo would take a cut from the ad sales on other apps, building on the $768 million in mobile revenue that the company generated last year. That amount lags far behind mobile ad leaders Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB).