Yahoo Finally Updates Search Ad Platform
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Yahoo’s search ad platform update, codenamed Panama, was finally released in mid-October, several months behind schedule. The makeover is supposed to help the company regain the lead (and ad revenue) it lost to Google years ago. Even if it works well, is it too little, too late?
Yahoo has been talking to SEO bloggers and others in the search advertising industry and press about Panama, and even held a conference at its headquarters designed to show off all the new features. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, I couldn't find any information on Yahoo's website about the update. A nice multi-page walk-through of the new interface, complete with screen shots, would have been helpful.
Yahoo itself can use all the help it can get right now. The company just announced its Q3 results, and they aren't as good as some analysts on Wall Street were hoping. The search engine reported net sales of $1.12 billion, not counting the money it pays to search advertising partners. That's about $20 million short of its target. While it made a profit of $159 million, or 11 cents per share, that's not as good as it did in the year-ago quarter: $254 million in net income, or 17 cents a share.
Next quarter doesn't look like it will be pretty either. Yahoo expects fourth quarter revenue on the order of $1.15 billion to $1.27 billion; even at the high end, it falls short of Wall Street expectations of $1.31 billion. Remember those problems Yahoo reported it was having recently with a slowdown in advertising in the auto and finance industries? That's expected to continue into the fourth quarter, affecting ad sales and Yahoo's bottom line.
Rather than focus on Yahoo's current problems and analyze what's going wrong (and why it should be doing better), let's start by looking at the ad system itself, and what went into it. What is Yahoo bringing to the table now? And will it keep more advertisers from absconding to Google?
Next: Building a Canal, er, Interface >>
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