Yahoo! Stock Surges on Revenues Driven by Paid Search
Yahoo!'s stock soared after announcing that its third quarter revenues jumped 43 percent powered in large part by strong sales of paid search results from its Overture acquisition, according to The Wall Street Journal. Contextual advertising is driving the success of online portals in many venues, though as reported by CNET News, the very success of this capability is spawning a lot of nefarious methods to drive people through revenue-producing "clicks" to Web site visits. There is a danger of this method reaching saturation, as advertisers try to over-position products and services through contextual ads, raising the risk of creating "ad spam" that becomes as annoying as email spam. But most of this is well within the control of the service providers to ensure a quality match between a site's content and the content of its ad partners. More importantly is how under-exploited this method is for supporting the contextualization and sale of premium content, as will be explored in Janice McCallum's soon-to-be-released report. Bottom Line: exploiting the contextual value of content online has barely begun.