Yahoo Reaches Out For Ad Partners
By Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 13, 2007
Yahoo and the other major portals are now all working strategies to place ad
inventory on the entire web, not just within their own domains. Their
short-term focus appears to be paying lots of money to sites like Bebo in order to “buy” the right
to place ad units.
I'd like to think that the KickApps platform presents a
much more cost effective, long-term model for the way Yahoo (and other portals) might “earn” real
estate on 3rd party websites---by providing those sites a range of
media functionality and, in turn, helping them build incremental page
impressions.
In an earlier blog I described all this as an “Open Portal” strategy, the idea being that portals need to open up (distribute) their content and functionality to web publishers if they wish to effectively compete for advertising real estate off their domains.
I'll repeat my favorite analogy: Think of the way NBC earns the right to insert ads on 3rd party television stations by providing them television shows. Imagine if NBC provided only ads to television stations (e.g. no television shows). Clearly the “adsense model” would not work for television networks and it won’t work indefinitely on the Web. And so it won’t be long before Google (and others) begin to think about packaging hosted applications with their ad programs to earn publisher loyalty. In a nutshell, that's what KickApps is all about.
I'm beginning to see your wisdom here, Eric. You certainly have earned what you describe in your analogy.
Great things here and to come.
Posted by: WebAlong | January 01, 2008 at 02:55 AM