Yahoo has announced that they will begin giving their users the ability to opt-out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. The feature will be added to the Yahoo privacy center by the end of August. This is an expansion of Yahoo's opt-out program for third-party networks. This was done in response to the inquiry by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. You can read a bit more about that over here. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Legal: Privacy | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Legal | Yahoo: Search Ads | Yahoo: SmartAds

Yahoo has partnered with LucidMedia to bring contextual display ad targeting capabilities to the company's RightMedia ad exchange. Advertisers will be able to contextually target display ads according to 63 vertical ad categories that RightMedia has established for the program. They include things like automotive, careers & jobs, clothing & apparel, finance, sports & recreation, and so on. Yahoo acquired RightMedia in early 2007 for more than $700 million. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Yahoo: Display Ads

Yahoo's mantra these days is openness. To that end, Yahoo may create the ability for users to view their ad profiles -- the data that's being used to target them with advertising on Yahoo and its extended network. Yahoo EVP Jeff Weiner, who spoke at the Economics of Social Media conference in LA yesterday, suggested that he'd like to see such a system in place at Yahoo. As CNET reports, a similar idea was floated but previously quashed at Yahoo. But now the environment in Sunnyvale is more (dare I say it?) open to the idea. Consumers have consistently reported to researchers that they prefer [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Legal: Privacy | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Search Ads

In articles on the NY Times and Wall Street Journal sites this morning, more details are surfacing about the intended Q3 rollout of Yahoo's new ambitious, integrated ad platform -- what President Sue Decker previously called "APEX" (advertiser-publisher exchange) and is now apparently being called "AMP." The idea is to allow Yahoo and its partners -- initially the members of the newspaper consortium -- to sell ads on each others' sites and throughout the network. The ads will at first be CPM-based graphical ads. Eventually the system will encompass the full range of ad types and formats, inc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: Partnerships | Yahoo: Publisher Network | Yahoo: Search Ads | Yahoo: SmartAds

Perhaps the perfection of Yahoo's vertical strategy is its new blog-inspired site Shine. It's a broad mix of content from publisher partners such as Hearst Communications, Rodale, and Condé Nast. It also aggregates and links to third party content and is encouraging users to blog on the site. Unlike Yahoo content-specific sites like Food, Shine is a kind of meta-vertical and focuses on a key Internet audience: women aged 25 to 54. Yahoo is also cross-promoting other Yahoo verticals (Food, Green, Health, Tech) on the site. If it succeeds, Shine will be a dream come true for brand marketers. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: Other

At the IAB conference in Phoenix on Monday, Yahoo President Sue Decker made some tantalizing allusions to a new ad platform called "Apex." According to the NY Times, this stands for "advertiser publisher exchange." Perhaps analogous to AOL's Platform A effort, it attempts to knit all of Yahoo's recent acquisitions and ad network properties together (e.g., RightMedia, Blue Lithium). The Times quotes Decker on the potential capabilities and intention behind the platform: We are building a cutting edge ad platform that runs across all formats, whether it is search, display, video. It is capabl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Mobile & Go | Yahoo: Search Ads | Yahoo: SmartAds

On Friday comScore put out ad publisher site rankings. Unsurprisingly, Yahoo ranked as the top site with just under 19 percent of US online display advertising. MediaPost took this data and further analyzed it, finding that Yahoo enjoys the industry's highest CPM rates at $12.65, more than $4 higher than the next highest site, MSNBC. Google, by contrast, enjoys just 1 percent of online display advertising, which Microsoft fears will change if/when the DoubleClick acquisition is approved by European regulators. Microsoft has a 6.7 percent share according to comScore. comScore display ad shar [...]

Related Topics: Business Issues: Acquisitions & Investments | Channel: Display | Microsoft & Yahoo Search Deal | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Yahoo: Display Ads

Google has MySpace, Microsoft has Facebook and now Yahoo has become the exclusive display ad provider for popular social networking site Bebo. Bebo reportedly has 38 million users globally, with its most popular sites in the UK and Ireland, although the company is based in San Francisco. Bebo search has been "powered by Yahoo" since roughly June of this year. And there are been several rumors of attempts to acquire Bebo, for up to $1 billion, including by Yahoo. I would imagine that these deals (search, display ads) now would make Yahoo a likely front runner in any new acquisition scenarios. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Yahoo: Display Ads

Yahoo feeds Trojan-laced ads to MySpace and PhotoBucket users from The Register reports that Yahoo's newly acquired Right Media served up ads with Trojan viruses for three weeks during the month of August. The flash ads reportedly contained a file that installed a Trojan back door on vulnerable Windows machines running Internet Explorer. The ads ran on MySpace, PhotoBucket, TheSun.co.uk, Bebo.com and UltimateGuitar.com. The Trojan required three criteria to be meet to cause issues on the Windows machine. First, the user had to be using IE on a Windows machine. Second, the Windows machin [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Legal: Security | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Display Ads

This afternoon Yahoo announced that it was buying US-based ad network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Founded in 2004, the company has 10 offices globally and claims more unique US visitors than Google, MSN, AOL and eBay. It also claims to be the fifth largest US ad network and the second largest in the UK. It's part of Yahoo's push to create "the largest and most effective online ad network globally." That network includes the recently acquired RightMedia Exchange. The company will apparently operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo and will report into Hilary Schneider's new orga [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: Outside US | Yahoo: SmartAds

The Wall Street Journal explores Yahoo's recently debuted "SmartAds" (prior coverage here), which mix behavioral targeting with other forms of targeting and dynamic elements to deliver a reportedly better response to display advertisers. The new ad platform was tested in Yahoo Travel and reportedly performed well (2x to 3x CTRs of normal display ads) and will be rolled out to other areas of the Yahoo site over time. From the WSJ article:Using SmartAds, advertisers provide Yahoo with sets of backgrounds, images and text that can be mixed and matched on the fly to create an all but unlimited n [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: SmartAds

Yahoo is introducing new SmartAds that deliver display ads to people across the web based on their demographic and geographic profiles, plus search and web browsing behaviors. These ads represent the future of graphical advertising at Yahoo, according to Gaude Lydia Paez, director of corporate communications at Yahoo. SmartAds have been successfully tested over the past four to five months in the travel category, and they will eventually roll out across the larger Yahoo network and ultimately on RightMedia and other partner sites. While SmartAds won't replace pure branding in all circumst [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: SmartAds

Yahoo announced that they are combining its search ad and display ad teams. As part of this move, David Karnstedt will be heading up North American sales. Karnstedt was Yahoo's senior vice president of Yahoo's search sales business and is now head of US sales overall. Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's Chief Sales Officer in the US, has left Yahoo to join Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Ms. Millard told the Wall Street Journal, "I'm sorry they announced the story this way because clearly I resigned and I have a great new job." "Integrating our world-class search and display sales teams under [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: Employees | Yahoo: Search Ads

Yahoo has announced it will acquire Right Media, which operates an auction-based display ad exchange called Remix Media. The move is widely seen as Yahoo fighting back against Google's recent plans to acquire DoubleClick, which itself is seen as Google jumping more firmly into the display ad network game. Both moves to me underscore how neither players' own existing ad networks have apparently been good enough for their display ambitions. Google has a massive ad network through AdSense. But that's not display! Yes, it is. AdSense has been offering display advertising since May 2004. That' [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: Acquisitions | Google: AdSense | Google: General | Google: Other Ads | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Display Ads | Yahoo: General