Bits: Yahoo Tries To Sell Google-Fighting Weapons

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By Saul Hansell

Can Yahoo win by building a coalition of losers?

BoomTown reports this morning that CNet is going to announce an expanded relationship with Yahoo this afternoon. In once sense that is a yawner. Those two have hooked up and broken up so many times over the last decade that they are some sort of dysfunctional couple who can neither commit nor leave each other.

But depending on the details, there may be a clue that Yahoo’s current strategy may be getting a tad bit of traction. As I wrote after Yahoo’s earnings call, the company seems to be trying to build its ad network among the mainstream publishers who feel most threatened by the rise of Google.

It’s no accident that Yahoo’s biggest advertising play right now is its coalition of regional newspapersâ€the media format that is most threatened in the current environment. CNet isn’t trying to defend mothballed printing presses and shriveling classified ad sections. But it is the epitome of old new media, struggling to stay relevant when blogs and other forms are giving technology advertisers alternatives to reach their customers.

The lightning rod for the publishers’ frustration, of course, is Google, which is the center of this new media world that connects people to both advertising and content without need for mainstream media. Moreover, Google’s text ad network, as well as the display ad networks like AOL’s advertising.com, are undercutting the big media brands’ prices by selling space on sites by the bushel.

As a result there is an opportunity for someone to become the Anti-Google, and help the big publishers fight back. Indeed, that’s the pitch of myriad advertising startups.

Yet Yahoo may be in a particularly good place to deliver Google fighting services.Unlike the startup ad networks, Yahoo can give publishers them traffic from its huge site. That’s part of the reported deal with Cnet. And it can even let them sell some of the ads on its site too. The group of newspapers it is working with have the right to sell impressions to people in their regions on Yahoo to their base of local advertisers. That helps the papers who actually have more demand for online ads than they have pages on which to put them.

It’s worth noting that none of this actually should really help Yahoo fend off Microsoft. If this strategy makes sense, it will work doubly well within a combined Microhoo because there is even more impressions and traffic to trade with publishers.

The bigger question is whether Yahoo, or Microsoft, can honestly say they stand against the forces of commoditization that are engulfing the advertising business. Both of them are trying as hard as they can to link their ad networks to the broadest array of publishers and advertisers. And Yahoo runs the Right Media exchange, which is the Chicago Board of Trade for Internet ads.

Google got to be Google in part because it bet on the long tail. It made it easy for millions of advertisers, especially very small operations, to do business with millions of publishers, taking a cut on billions of ad impressions. Yahoo may make friends and do some good business working with the big publishers most threatened by this trend, but it will be in a tough spot if it really bets the company against it.

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Yahoo Tries to Sell Google-Fighting Weapons

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