Yahoo Amps up Efforts to Tackle AdWords

Yahoo's new Amp advertising platform aims to cut the red tape and bureaucracy that buyers and sellers must navigate to cut advertising deals over the Web.

Google AdWords may be the current king of online advertising, but on Monday, heavyweight rival Yahoo announced its own challenger, a new online advertising platform dubbed Amp. With it, Yahoo will attempt to consolidate different types of Web advertising into one platform that it hopes will draw in advertisers and publishers with ease of use.

Yahoo envisions Amp as a sort of stock market for Web advertising, where people where buyers and sellers of ads can freely trade impressions as easily as they now trade stock shares. Ad buyers will be able to shop among search, display, local, mobile, and video ads, and target audiences by their interests, geographic location, or demographics. A host of tools included in the system will also make it possible to see how advertising efforts measured up using common advertising metrics.

“While online advertising grows more sophisticated, the process of doing business today is surprisingly cumbersome and manual,” said Hilary Schneider, Yahoo’s EVP of Global Partner Solutions, in a statement. “Amp from Yahoo will enable advertisers and publishers to connect with each other and their exact target audiences across the increasingly fragmented Internet, in a way that’s not possible with current solutions.”

The Amp network of publishers already includes what Yahoo calls its Newspaper Consortium – over 600 major newspaper publishers including the Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, and Denver Post. Other big online destinations with impressions for sale will include eBay, WebMD, and of course, Yahoo itself.

Although Yahoo is currently testing the Amp system with select publishers, it won’t be ready to launch on a wider scale until the third quarter of 2008.