DISQUS

David Ulevitch · 2 years ago

Dave -- Your headline says it all. Well done.

John · 2 years ago

Easier said than done! Where Yahoo! is aiming for, Google has already been for several years...

Jeff Tokarz · 2 years ago

'Big' doesn't necessarily translate to mean 'leading'. Innovate, engage stakeholders, monetize, etc....lead! Great post Dave!

Steve Morsa · 2 years ago

Excellent insight and ideas to consider, Dave.

Yahoo is an excellent company with an "Internet (elephant) footprint" others will never have...but would kill to own...

Here's my recommendation: Leverage their huge member/user base by implementing a new form of PPC where advertisers are able to bid direclty on the actual traits and characteristics (keytraits) of their most desired customers instead of indirectly on the words they enter into little search boxes (s explained in the white paper at MatchTo.com and detailed in pending patent #11/250,908).

The deleterious effects that such a frictionless ad system/platform would have on Google can only be imagined...

Sebastien · 2 years ago

Good post. I agree with the analysis but isn't it ironic that the same problem seem to be plaguing all traditional media as well (re: their online initiatives). I've been reading a a lot of reports lately about how newspapers for example do not monetize their online traffic as well as their offline circulation. Is Google the only company able to properly monetize their eyeballs?

John Filmore · 2 years ago

Bad post. Yahoo buying a CPA advertising company is like suggesting to Gannet, now that they have USA Today, they go after the Upper Darby Daily. Yahoo has invested in Right Media, anything else is a step back.

Monkey Boy · 2 years ago

Actually they are fixing this as we speaks: http://www.rightmedia.com/content/news-events/y...

Cheap inventory for acution anyone?

Dave McClure · 2 years ago

johnf: the summary of my post wasn't suggesting the answer to fixing monetization was simply to buy a CPA advertising company. if Yahoo's investment in Right Media helps solve the problem, good for them.

Thomas Hawk · 2 years ago

[disclaimer: I'm Evangelist and CEO for Zooomr]

On the last earnings call Yahoo COO Daniel Rosenweig specifically brought up monetization and also pointed specifically to some of Yahoo's Web 2.0 business by name as unmonetized.

"From our standpoint, we are going to move ahead as the market leader and better position ourselves to take advantage of this new inventory and this new market opportunity. We have products like Answers. We have products like Flickr that are not yet really monetized right now. But we have assets that nobody else has and we plan to leverage those assets, so those assets are not only the quality of our audience, which I think is debatable in some of these other environments, but our targeting capability of not only the environments that they are in, but our profiles of being able to know who they are and that is why our large registered audience base, which continues to grow, is becoming so important."

How do you think Yahoo! will, or do you think they will, monetize the various Web 2.0 properties they've been buying.

Stanley Wong · 2 years ago

Great article. One correction here. CPM actually refers to Cost Per Thousand or Cost Per Mil. It is a term that originated in the traditional media circles (print & broadcast) to refer to the cost of a thousand impressions or viewings.

Keep up the good work!

Alex Moskalyuk · 2 years ago

This one is hard not to agree with. With proper monetization Yahoo! has quite a few of strong properties that generally get omitted in Yahoo! vs Google comparisons.

Yahoo! Mail is either #1 or #2, depending on whose numbers you look at, always vying for top spot with Hotmail.

Yahoo! News is #1 in news sites, with CNN and others lagging a bit.

Yahoo! Finance is #1 with such a huge lead, that it's not even worth mentioning any competitors.

In quite a few other categories, like sports, instant messaging, comparison shopping and search it's in the top 3.

With the exception of search I don't see Google getting anywhere near the top in all of the above mentioned categories. Maybe news, if Google ever starts hosting feeds from Reuters, AP, etc. But so far their competitive products have not caught up. They naysayers usually say "but wait, Google's products are brand new, it takes a while to get market share established", so by now Gmail must have caught up with the leading players, right? Ahh, not really, Gmail is still at single-digit market share with growth reaching the plateau a while ago.

Ian Kennedy · 2 years ago

[disclosure: I work at and evangelize Yahoo]

Thomas,

You're seeing the first steps in this monetization with the release of Flickr's Camera Finder [http://www.flickr.com/cameras/]. By taking the implicit meta-data left behind as our users interact with these services, we can aggregate and package data & recommendations that are useful for everyone, even for those that do not use the service. With this aggregation and packaging, flickr now has an excellent place to go research digital cameras which, if I were a camera maker, I would love to spend ad dollars. Transactional links to shopping.yahoo.com are already plugged into each individual camera page which speaks directly to Dave's suggestion of more CPA type opportunity.

Thanks for the post Dave. Not going to comment except to say that we're very focused on the points you raise and looking forward to stretching our legs as we come out of the blocks with the new Ad Platform.

Ian

Joseph Hunkins · 2 years ago

Right on - but it's even easier. Publishers are willing to spend a LOT of innovations and time finding the best monetization relationships with search engines and these can generally beat Google's automated routines. If you add this to cost per sale follow up metrics you have something that is unspoofable and better than Google. Google is milking the cow until the cow gets smart. Fortunately for Google them evolution is slow and humans are stupid.

Ed · 2 years ago

The only thing yahoo! needs to do better is pffer an alternative to AdSense. Gooogle currently has 100% of the market. Yahoo!, launch something, anything, please.

Dave McClure · 2 years ago

ed: guessing you have not heard about Yahoo Publishing Network (aka YPN):
http://publisher.yahoo.com/

YPN launched in beta to US-based publishers in August 2005.

however, i think the comment you meant to suggest was that Yahoo might want to do more to promote YPN as an alternative to AdSense.

any Yahoos want to respond on that one?

Harry Wakefield · 2 years ago

It boils down to the ad engine and overall execution. Yahoo is a media company, Google is an advertising company, it’s all about Adwords and Adsense and have done a terrific job of optimizing both. How many SME’s rave about “Yahoo! Search Marketing Products”?

Carl E. Person · 2 years ago

Why don't search engines competing with Google (including Yahoo, MSN, 7Search) offer AdWords-type PPC advertising services through legitimate auctions (where the prices are set by the advertisers, not Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) and (A) filter out multiple clicks to stop click fraud; and (B) display an identifying code for each advertiser to inform the search-engine users what type of website is running the ad (such as a website with all ads and no content; a website providing ads with reviews or other content; a website providing comparative pricing, etc.). In this way, let the free informed market determine the price of AdWords-type advertising instead of having Google fix the prices through its present practices of unilaterally halting ads unless the advertiser agrees to pay 50, or 100 or 500 times more than he/she wanted to bid?
Carl E. Person
Please look at my antitrust complaint against Google/AdWords at www.lawmall.com/google

G Gotch · 2 years ago

Is it really that or more that the internet isn't just about content or functionality but also about popularity and the need for something new and fresh. Websites are becoming like the Lindsey Lohans and Paris Hiltons of the moment. Extremely popular, but outside of that, is there anything really that different outside of being "popular". Take the rise of Google, it wasn't just the great search results that launched it to the stars, it was also the world of mouth popularity, and now that is is a 500 buck stock, their current position is guaranteed through the popularity of their sucess.
The thing is, these stars are of the moment and when friends find something new, being everyone is linked they are gather there. So in a way websites, search, whatever is like the favorite style of the moment. Whoever has the next cool new thing that basically does things a little different, that will be the next destination. How else can you explain U-Tube and how much longer can people stayed glued to amatuers dancing to a webcam? Remember, something new is a 1 sec click away!

James · 2 years ago

Good Contribution

Jessica · 2 years ago

Hello, I came across your blog posting after searching for sports betting sites and your post on Yahoo just needs to fix one thing: Monetization makes an interesting read. Thanks for sharing. I will research more next Thursday when I have the day off.

Carl E. Person · 2 years ago

Here is the solution, one which I'm now asking the federal courts to determine: require Google to allow me, Yahoo and other website owners to monetize their website traffic using Google's AdWords system on a non-discriminatory basis. The justification? Because Google acquired its monopoly in search advertising (and monetization of social networking websites) through acquisitions, not through in-house development. The remedy is to push back Google's pricing to pre-monopoly levels. See my brief on appeal and supporting record references at my website www.lawmall.com/google.
Carl E. Person
Plaintiff pro se and antitrust and
civil rights lawyer.
PS. I was running for NYS Attorney General in 2006 thinking I could develop an email list of 1,000,000 names at 1 cent per click, and at the start of my efforts Google changed my price for unwanted keywords to $.50 per click, while continuing to charge ebay only 1/2 cent per click for the same "unwanted" words.
Carl E. Person