Yahoo has officially opened its new search-marketing platform known as Panama to new US advertisers. The new platform was available to current users in October. New businesses that want to use the platform can create an account in five steps. The limited October release allowed Yahoo to receive feedback from users and make improvements based on the users recommendations.
“We’ve received an overwhelmingly positive response to our new search marketing platform to date, so we are thrilled to open it up to all businesses that want to take advantage of our more intuitive and powerful system,” said Steve Mitgang, senior vice president, Yahoo! advertising products and platforms. In the first quarter of 2007 Yahoo plans to have a new ranking algorithm in place. It will be a similar feature to Google’s Quality Score. After the first quarter Yahoo will begin making Panama available on a global scale. So far the response to the new platform from advertisers has been positive. “Yahoo! has long been a key search marketing partner of ours, and based on the performance we’ve seen so far, we’re confident that the new platform will allow us to deliver even more value to our clients,” said Stuart Larkins, Vice President Search, Performics, a division of DoubleClick On the issue of competing with Google some do not think Yahoo’s new platform will be a factor in attracting advertisers away from Google. “Yahoo! is inviting hundreds of thousands of its customers to use the new service, but investors have to question why advertisers would go through the work and risk of moving from Google’s highly successful platform to Panama. The answer is that they won’t,” wrote Douglas McIntyre for bloggingstocks.
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