Yahoo!’s first quarter financial results may have been a disappointing, but that hasn’t stopped them from acquiring a hefty stake in Indian internet advertising company Tyroo Media. Yahoo! hasn’t revelaed how much it paid. The hefty stake of Tyroo lays the groundwork for Yahoo!’s upcoming Indian roll outs of its new search-based advertising platform, Panama, and RightMedia’s graphical ad technologies.®
Yahoo! India has grabbed a 35 per cent stake in the Guragaon-based Tyroo, which runs a small business-centric ad network spanning roughly 1,200 sites. Unlike Google Adsense, Tyroo is non contextual
Interestingly enough, advertisers can run both graphical and text-based ads on the Tyroo network even if they don’t have a web site – still a bit of luxury for subcontinent small businesses. Ads can drive consumers back to advertisers via email or SMS.
Yahoo! and Tyroo say they will remain separate businesses, but the companies have decided to link their ad platforms, so that advertisers can have easy access to both.
Earlier this month, Yahoo! unveiled a new banner ad platform called SmartAds that allows marketers to target web surfers according to their online behavior. In February, the company introduced Project Panama, an advertising program designed to make text ads more relevant to searches. The company claims the new software is boosting results.
SmartAds
SmartAds gives the power to marketers to create and distribute targeted banner ads using data that Yahoo! collects about individual web surfers. If a user has recently searched Yahoo! for DVD players, for instance, he might see a graphical ad that includes sale prices for DVD players at a nearby retail store. Such contextual targeting has long been a part of the text-based ads that turn up when you search sites like Yahoo! and Google, but it’s a step up for banner ads.
Todd Teresi of Yahoo! says on SmartAds,
Yahoo!’s SmartAds gives marketers what they want from online advertising: the ability to deliver customized marketing messages to consumers, and still engage very large audiences with their brand, By enabling marketers to reach consumers on a more tailored basis and helping creative agencies support those customized campaigns, we can provide an even more engaging, relevant online experience to the more than 500 million users of Yahoo! branded products and services.
Project Panama
Panama, launched in February, is Yahoo’s long-delayed answer to Google’s AdWords which works on the system of “qualityâ€-based bidding. Yahoo’s new platform features a host of new campaign management tools, a new user interface, better technical integration, and most importantly, quality-based bidding, all of which were seen as necessary for the company to close the gap with key rival Google. Before Panama, Yahoo ranked ads based just on the price of the bid.
