by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
One of AdWords' many successes is that you do not have to be an Internet giant to use and benefit from it - and so many people pay to use it. This same policy has been applied to AdSense, even small websites can show adverts for Google and collect their share of the clickthrough price. As a result AdSense is all over the Internet. Yahoo has a contextual advertising offering as well but it is currently limited to sizable sites and it is not available to the masses.Andrew Girdwood
Yahoo's aiming to change this and has been testing their alternative to AdSense. Examples of Yahoo! powered contextual sponsored links were sighted on Flickr (a photo host and recent Yahoo acquisition) and more recently in Yahoo! Groups. This particular screen shot of Yahoo! links in the email came from a Gmail account in a message thread which began with Google AdWords.
Time will tell whether Yahoo! is too late to the table (and they're not there yet) with their mass offering but there are some quirks which may make the system tempting. Yahoo's! YQ search by example tool is a handy addition to many sites, is not something Google offers and will be easy to include in a pay-for-click scheme. Site owners may have to decide whether they'll want to run Google advertising or Yahoo's and unlike searchers these webmasters will have to accept terms and conditions which demand exclusivity.
