Yahoo’s been busy lately – in addition to announcing its third quarter financial results, the company has sealed deals with Cars.com, Forbes.com, Ziff Davis Media, and WebMD.
Those first three entities now qualify as “premium publishers” in Yahoo’s eyes. And although you probably know what the first two do, we’ll point out that Ziff Davis runs magazines such as eWeek and PC Magazine; Yahoo has really cozied up to an array of markets with this move.
Marketers in each of them are supposed to benefit as a result. Yet The Register’s Drew Cullen notes, “The deals represent an unusual twist on the way most advertising networks . . . place bottom feeder ads to soak up the excess inventory of third party publishers. Yahoo! by contrast is offering its own inventory to give page-impression constrained publishers a way of fulfilling bigger campaigns than they could on their own site.”
Cullen goes on to add, “Yahoo! doesn’t say how the gig will work out in practice,” but the new agreements are multi-year in nature, so we’ll have plenty of time to analyze them. Also, Cars.com, Forbes.com, and Ziff-Davis Media presumably had plenty of confidence in Yahoo’s approach.
WebMD, which reached a multi-year agreement, as well, might feel the same way. In this deal, both advertising and search are involved – Yahoo will power search functions on all of WebMD’s sites.
Combined with the third quarter results, these developments may help change some minds about the search company.
