To the question of whether search and display ads are really different worlds, a savvy industry exec put it simply: "At the end of the day, it's all just real estate. " In other words, as ad and audience tracking technologies get better and better, it's all about maximizing yield. If you've got a place on a web page for commercial messages, your technology should tell you whether a search ad, a display ad, or for that matter a video ad or gasp -- even editorial matter that may spur more page views -- is the best way to make money.
That argues for unified ad systems. Maybe Yahoo's AMP is better than whatever Google's working on, post-Double Click, but letting Google onto Yahoo pages is not the greatest harbinger that Yahoo could eventually win ad battles with the online ad leader.
#2: Beyond the intricacies and impacts of the Google/Yahoo deal (and whether in fact it musters anti-trust review on two continents and even Congressional Republicans talking up anti-competitiveness), Yahoo's precarious state overall is most worrying to publishers. This year's double-digit decline in print revenues and the halving of newspaper digital revenue growth rates has raised publicly the ugly word, "default." As the lights dim, publishers' bet and reliance on Yahoo gets bigger and bigger.
Each week, it seems there's another "summit" of newspaper consortium members -- top sales teams (VPs, directors, managers) with Yahoo consortium execs -- all focused on making the most of the emerging Yahoo-fueled sales opportunities, both on newspaper.coms and local Yahoo pages. (MediaNews was in to Sunnyvale just last week.) So any interruption in that sales momentum would be the worst possible news for the news industry.
The list of what could interrupt that momentum is lengthening.
The depletion of Yahoo's staff, if accelerated, could slow down AMP development and implementation. We don't know what's going on inside Yahoo, but recent defections signal that lots of people might be taking their eye off the ball.
Further, Jerry Yang's tenure has got to be coming to an end, and where will that leave his #2 Sue Decker? The exec leading the newspaper consortium build has been ex-Knight Ridder Digital head Hilary Schneider, who's gained power in lockstep with Decker. If Decker ascends, well, maybe that wouldn't hurt.
But given the blood being called for by Carl Icahn and other increasingly upset and litigious shareholders, don't bet on Decker moving up. What's more likely is new leadership, leadership called upon to reorient the company mightily, or as likely, prepare it intelligently for sale. New management certainly means at least a rethinking of the substantial resources Yahoo is devoting to the consortium.
The short-term negative: a confusion about priorities that slows AMP development down.
The potential longer-term positive: with national and search advertising growth both slowing, maybe local advertising really is the major growth opportunity Schneider's been touting and new leadership doubles down on it.
Place your bets.
