Yahoo Stream Ads - Are They Getting Back Into Paid Search?

[OhioTom76]

Three years ago, Yahoo replaced it's own PPC platform, "Panama", with Microsoft's AdCenter platform, now known as Bing Ads. It was a win for both sides in many ways - Microsoft's PPC platform only had single digit market share and was in a distant third place to Google and Yahoo. On the other hand, Yahoo's platform was terrible and buggy - they didn't have the in-house talent to build a good PPC platform.

However, this agreement was set to expire earlier this year, yet they renewed it for one more year. However it appears Yahoo is trying to get out of the deal. In the meantime they have also launched a new ad service called Yahoo Stream Ads.

I've not personally used Yahoo Stream Ads, but after initially looking through the sales pitch for them, they look a lot like their previous "Paid Inclusion" program, where you could pay for your ads to show up in their organic search results.

Are any of you currently using this? I would be interested to hear your experiences with it and learn more about how it works. The CPC's are really low on it, from what I've read so far. I believe in the initial launch, everything was a fixed price at 5 cents, but now I think everything is still under $2 per click.

 

[MyDigitalpoint]

Problem with Yahoo, and eventually with Microsoft PPC platform is that their efforts could be a good alternative to Google Adsense even if the CPC would be low, but they were always afraid to step into the global market.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft always limited their advertising programs to U.S. residents and probably if Yahoo stream ads are back, the same policy will apply.

While America is the big consumer the whole world targets to, there are many publishers in all the countries around the world that devote their efforts to make full websites in English language, their premise is the U.S. market and what they offer is aimed to an American audience mainly, but because the are not physically located in the United States, Yahoo and Microsoft decided to turn down their applications to join their ad networks, while Google Adsense accepted them.

This was and will always be the big strategy mistake of Yahoo and despite AdSense is in decline due to low conversion rates they pay -- if they ever pay --- they will continue dominating the advertising market.

There is a good paying ad network, but once again, they only accept U.S. based publishers, hence the reason very few of them know about it; 7search.