Cnet via NYT has the story of the Yahoo Publisher Network launch. More on this Weds…
From the piece:
Yahoo is planning to launch on Wednesday an ad network for small Web publishers intended to strengthen its hand against rival Google, a source familiar with the plan told CNET News.com.
As previously reported, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has been working for months on a self-serve advertising service tailored to bloggers and other small Web publishers, a move that homes in on Google’s territory.
About time. You’d think Yahoo would have not laid back and let Gogole eat its lunch for as long as it did, but Google has, and now Yahoo has to win the contextual advertising market back (Overture/Yahoo could have owned the AdSense market instead of Google, it was working on the idea with Applied Semantic before Google bought it), fight Google’s exclusive AdSense contracts, etc. Pity.
Good that there’s more competition, wonder how this will play out though and I wonder what, already, the Google/Yahoo split is…
Yahoo Messenger might be a key factor in this in the future, as it seems MSN are dropping the ball in this area.
More interesting than the rest is that it’s Yahoo branded rather than under the Overture name.