Yahoo has landed a big advertising deal with Viacom to provide contextual ads for 33 Viacom websites like MTV.com, VH1.com, Comedycentral.com, etc. This is a multi-year deal that could potentially expand to 140 additional Viacom websites all over the World.
Clearly Google wouldn’t have been Viacom’s first choice for an ad service, not after they’re seeking $1 billion in damages for copyright infringement.
According to Beta News, Viacom’s combined traffic numbers for all of their entertainment sites ranked #1 in their category and 11th overall. And during February, they had over 90 million unique visitors which potentially means big $$ for Yahoo (this data came from comScore Media Metrix).
Yahoo’s Panama system will be used to provide the contextual ads because it’s Yahoo’s latest way of providing ads. Panama displays ads based upon both the fee advertisers pay, along with the ad relevancy in the search query. It has done Yahoo well since it was introduced and has increased their click-through rate substantially.
According to Yahoo spokeswoman Gaude Lydia Paez, they’ll be using their typical revenue-sharing deal that’s used with most of their other partners. This is definitely a big deal for Yahoo and their Panama ad program, and should prove to be a good money-maker.
So these ads point to Yahoo! services? It’s a little funny that Yahoo! has ads to other sites and other sites have ads for Yahoo! So I guess for Yahoo! to make money on this people have to first click the ad from some site to Yahoo! then click the ad from Yahoo! to some site.
No, the ads don’t point to Yahoo! services. Yahoo is providing the contextual ads for all of the Viacom sites. For example, we use Google Adsense for CyberNet. The ads don’t point to Google, they point to a variety of different websites and services who paid Google to advertise. Hopefully that makes sense?
In this Yahoo/Viacom situation, Yahoo is managing all of the ads that will be displayed on the Viacom sites. For each advertiser whose ad is displayed on a Viacom site, Yahoo will get a certain percentage of it.
Man, Viacom is really trying to stick it to Google for some reason. I would think that they would try to be buddy buddy with them.