Tests going on in Japan and pending in Britain will return paid search ads on mobile handsets that access Yahoo Search.
Text ads will pop up on handsets in mobile-mad Japan when users visit Yahoo Search, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. Yahoo! Mobile senior VP Doug Garland told Bloomberg News that Yahoo would be auctioning ad space on its mobile travel site in the UK.
At the CTIA Show in San Francisco, Yahoo cited numbers showing cellphones have been outselling computers at a 3 to 1 ratio. Experiments with ads on mobile handsets will be a first for the portal company, and will draw on Yahoo’s local search expertise to better target this advertising:
“The way that Yahoo! is going to stay relevant and essential is by extending our services beyond the PC browser to all devices that consumers use,” Mr. Garland said Wednesday in an interview at a conference in San Francisco. “There will be a paid search market that develops.”
The competition has heated up dramatically in the local search arena, an area that figures to be the one offering the biggest growth for search engines and their marketing efforts. All of the major search engines like Yahoo have local search products. Their services let users find specific local information, like movie times, restaurant locations, and directions from place to place.
Where the companies could find a significant return would be in the highly lucrative pay-per-call area. Users calling a business via an ad link appearing on a mobile Yahoo search would bring money to Yahoo with each call.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
