Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads

Yahoo formally launches its ad network

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 12:44 pm

Yahoo on Wednesday formally christened its new ad network, dubbed APT.

The ad exchange, which was formally known as AMP!, is aiming to streamline the display ad buying process by boiling planning and optimizing down to a dashboard. The platform is being rolled out in phases with the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News as the first customers.

APT is an important initiative for Yahoo as it tries to close its monetization gap with Google. With APT, Yahoo is trying to bring more efficiency to display ads and better monetize remnant inventory and better cross sell.

In a statement, Yahoo said APT has “the potential to allow unprecedented ease of cross-selling across the largest open network of publishers, advertisers, ad networks and agencies from a single integrated interface.”

Also see: Odds for Yahoo-AOL deal may increase

That’s a fancy way of saying Yahoo is rolling up ad buys into a dashboard that looks like this:

Yahoo already has a captive audience via its partnerships with hundreds of newspapers, but the big question is whether the exchange holds up over time. Google with its DoubleClick acquisition is looking to bring similar efficiencies to the display ad market.

Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: September 24, 2008

Yahoo announced on Wednesday the details about its system to buy and sell display advertising online, with the hope that the company can dominate the display ad market in the same way Google steers the search market.

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Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

William Dean Singleton of MediaNews, left, Sue Decker, president of Yahoo, and Jerry Yang, chief of Yahoo, on Wednesday.

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Times Topics: Yahoo! Inc.

The new platform, called APT, will allow both publishers and advertisers to manage display advertising across the Web sites of several hundred newspapers across the country, along with Yahoo sites and large sites like eBayand WebMD.

At an event at Advertising Week in New York, executives said that the 800 or so members of Yahoo’s newspaper consortium would be using the system, formerly known as AMP, by the end of the year.

For advertisers, the new system would simplify the buying of display ads. Currently, advertisers typically buy display advertising from individual sites, or use ad networks, where they do not always control where their ads appear. If the platform develops as Yahoo promised, it would allow newspapers to make more money from online advertising. National advertisers do not want to make hundreds of tiny purchases, and the APT platform would make member newspapers’ Web site space available to national advertisers through one national purchase.

It would also let publishers use Yahoo’s targeting capabilities for ads on their sites, and use the demographic and behavioral information Yahoo has about users to show them appropriate ads. That “allows us to charge more” for the advertising space, said William Dean Singleton, the chief executive of the MediaNews Group, at the event.

Publishers can also allow Yahoo and other newspapers to sell their ad space as long as it meets a minimum price. For example, if a publisher knows his sales force can get $1 per thousand impressions on a certain ad unit, he might allow partners to sell it if they can get $1.25 or higher.

The San Jose Mercury News and The San Francisco Chronicle have been testing the system, and the next users will be Cox Newspapers, the MediaNews Group and Scripps Newspapers. In 2009, Yahoo will offer APT to advertisers, agencies and advertising networks...

Google: See, Our Ad Deal With Yahoo Is Harmless (GOOG, YHOO)

Vasanth Sridharan | September 25, 2008 2:00 PM

Google, in its quest to convince people that its search ad deal with Yahoo is a good thing for the industry -- and not a monopoly over search -- has launched a fact site detailing exactly how the deal will work.

The antitrust pitch we’ve heard before, but the interesting thing Google lays out in a 17-page slideshow, embedded below, is exactly how the ads will look. Google also explains how the deal compares to allegedly similar deals in other industries.

The message Google's hoping to express is still the same: this deal is not anticompetitive. But here, like before, Google isn’t saying that ad prices won’t go up:

Google does not set the prices manually for ads; rather, advertisers themselves determine prices through an ongoing competitive auction. We have found over years of research that an auction is by far the most efficient way to price search advertising and have no intention of changing that...

Yahoo Fat Farm: How Many People Does Yahoo Need To Fire To Get "Fit"?

Henry Blodget | September 25, 2008 2:02 PM

Yahoo's fat as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore. So they've hired Bain...

Yahoo’s Right Media ad exchange was so broken some turned it off

After Yahoo confirmed it has been experiencing problems with latency at its Right Media exchange on Monday, I’ve heard from those at ad networks using RXM, verifying latency issues were widespread. How bad was it? One Right Media client actually turned off Right Media exchange for a period until latency issues improved. It’s not clear if the problems have been fixed for everyone yet, though, or what the problems were. As of this writing, Yahoo hasn’t responded to my request for comment...