Decker: Yahoo! Won't Cede Search

NEW YORK With Yahoo! under pressure to do a deal with Microsoft, company executives said they remain committed to maintaining the firm's search business. Sue Decker, Yahoo!'s president, said the company would not consider any deal that separated search from display advertising because the company believes the two, while mostly separate today, will come together in the future. "It's a false distinction to say search is one thing and display another," she said during a lunch meeting with reporters in New York. "Our vision is for these to converge. Today we call them search and display. In the future, we'll just call them online advertising." Yahoo! has tested using Google ads on some of its search results, and Microsoft is also interested in gaining control of Yahoo!'s search business short of an outright acquisition of the company. "We'd be open to anything as long as it's consistent with our convergence model," she said. Google makes as much as 30 percent more than Yahoo! per search, a fact Decker acknowledged, while adding that Yahoo!'s Panama search ad system "has exactly performed as we hoped." Instead of viewing search as a distinct entity, Decker believes the targeting and response rates search ads enjoy can be applied to the 90 percent of Web pages that are not search results. The company is building out a far-reaching ad platform called AMP designed to facilitate buying and selling display ads and improving advertisers' targeting capabilities.Decker disputed the notion that Yahoo! is turning its back on brand advertising by focusing on trading ad impressions "like pork bellies," as former Yahoo! sales chief Wenda Harris Millard once said. "What this can do is unleash the creativity of the industry," she said. To do that, the unsexy plumbing problem of the Internet has to be solved, Decker said. Running an ad campaign is needlessly complicated and time consuming compared to the ease of doing search. "Brand advertising suffers from a back-office system that's so antiquated," she said. AMP is designed to alleviate those headaches, while also allowing publishers to extend ad campaigns to other sites their visitors go. The result, Yahoo! hopes, is more relevant ads and bigger budgets moving online. "The display ad will become much more relevant," said Michael Walrath, svp of the advertising marketplaces group at Yahoo!.

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Decker: Yahoo! Won't Cede Search

Brian Morrissey

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