|
By Dave Porter (AXcess News) Reno, NV - Last week, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced the debut of its new AdCenter at a Redmond, Wash.-based forum for advertisers. Today, Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) is expected to release details of its newly rebuilt advertising system, paving the way for a new round of online advertising competition between the two search engines and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), currently the dominant plyaer in online contextual advertising. Yahoo's new advertising system is considered the biggest development Yahoo has come up with this year and is the first change to it's advertising platform since it was launched by internet start-up GoTo in the laet-1990s, according to Tim Cadogan, vice-president of saerch at Yahoo. GoTo, which was later renamed Overture, was the pioneer in advertising linked to content serach results. Yahoo acquired Overture two years ago and shortly aftreward Google launched a similar advertising platfrom that resulted in a legal battle which was settled before Google's IPO. You would think that with Yahoo's lead in contextual link advertising tied to search results that it would miantain its market dominance, but Google soon overtook Yahoo in market share and has remained the market leader ever since. Yahoo generates 30-50 percent less advertising income for each search conducted on its site than Google does, according to market estimates, which makes sense, since Google spiders more pages freely than Yahoo, which only grabs one link and then holds Web sites hostage by commanding a fee per link that is charged annually. So the logic here was fewer pages and therefore fewer ads, which also meant lower levels of use by Internet users. Cadogan says that Yahoo is changing the way it proiritizes links that are displayed. In the past, links were displayed based on how much an advertiser paid, with the highest bidders standing on top. That created a dominating format where some ads had top positions but few click-throughs, which loewred the search engine's revenue. The new Yahoo ad format will take into consideration several factors, which includes click-through-rates (CTR), Cadogan said. The format closely mirrors Google's. When Yahoo changes the technology that advertisers ues to bid for, and manage, portfolios of keywords on the system its new ad format will be applied, which Cadogan said would happen shortly. Yahoo believes the new ad technology will encourage more advertsiers to use the ad management system and thus, increase Yahoo's ad revenue while providing advretiesrs more bank for the buck. Yahoo's new advertising platform tkaes into consideration factors such as demographics or user behavior besides keyword search terms. But MSN's new contextual ad platform promises similar "intelligence" factors and unlike Yahoo, MSN is partnered with one of the top onlnie ad agencies in its deal with DoubleClick who will open up the program to third-parties. But Cadogan boasts that Yahoo's ad program will be diverse and enable Yahoo to eventually offer it across other types of content, such as video, whcih is virgin territory for Web advertisers, though thnaks to netwrok televisoin its opening up new markets. CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) just announced its cable-TV move into Web entertainment last week and brought with it two large advertisres with its launch.
| 
