While Yahoo struggles as a company, with rumors of everything from layoffs to acquisition swirling, some suggest that Yahoo.com remains strong and vital as a media property. In a column in Advertising Age, Abbey Klaasen and Michael Learmonth examine the current state of advertising and Yahoo.
The authors make the case succinctly in the words of one of their sources:
“Advertisers are looking at where’s the traffic, volume and value is today. And today is very positive for advertisers at Yahoo,” said Chris Moloney, chief marketing officer at Scottrade, which in August was the top online-ad spender, according to TNS Media Intelligence. “Google is considered to be the 800-pound gorilla of the internet but it doesn’t have content the way Yahoo does. It receives a massive volume of traffic.”
Another interesting point comes later in the article and addresses the fundamental challenge of Yahoo’s strategy going forward:
Part of Yahoo’s choice, Mr. [Rob] Norman [of Group M Interaction] said, is whether to play to its strengths in display advertising or attempt to out-Google Google and the ad networks. “The dominant gene in Yahoo is to think of advertising as a math problem — machines talking to machines,” he said. “If you reduce it to a math problem, we go to Ad.com.”
