Advertisers Say: Yahoo's Down But Not Out
This story was written by Tameka Kee.
Don't count Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) outat least that's what agencies like GroupM and companies like Chrysler are saying. Yahoo's stock price may be hovering at the $10 mark and analysts say the company is a lame duck without a partner like *Microsoft* (or worse, AOL), but in an Ad Age article, marketing execs laid out why they rate Yahoo a must buy when it comes to online advertising.
Quality content: How good is Yahoo's content? Chrysler CMO Deborah Wahl Meyer says an ad on Yahoo's home page is about as valuable as four 30-second spots during a hit prime-time showand the automaker made Yahoo buys a key part of its strategy for promoting the 2009 Dodge Ram. Meanwhile, Scottrade CMO Chris Moloney said *Google* can't touch Yahoo when it comes to depth of content. "Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is considered to be the 800-pound gorilla of the internet but it doesn't have content the way Yahoo does," he said. TNS says Scottrade was the top online advertiser (in terms of overall spend) back in August, so Moloney knows a bit about dishing out massive budgets.
Traffic and scale: "Yahoo has the greatest scale and the greatest potential as a brand builder in the online world," said GroupM CEO Rob Norman. For example, its "Primetime in No Time" show, which recaps the previous night's TV shows as two minute clips, garners over a million views per day, while its "TechTicker" business show gets 450,000 daily views. In August, the Yahoo Olympics site snagged more visitors than NBC and Microsoft's JV NBCOlympics.com, while Yahoo Video overtook MySpace TV as the second-ranked video site (just behind YouTube) in September.
But just because Yahoo has these gems doesn't mean the company knows how to make them shine. As we've seen over the past few years, Yahoo launches products and servicesparticularly in the social media spaceand then shutters them when they fail to gain traction. Then there are the dire predictions for the display market in 2009 ...
By Tameka Kee