Panama to the Rescue

Techcrunch has a good post on why Panama is important, not only to Yahoo!, but to the rest of us. I agree fully with Michael on this is very important to get more competition in the space. For monetizing traffic for big publishers, we competed with Google AdSense at what is now Ligatus and did so very well, based on different methods and a slightly different idea. Now with Ormigo we are actually banking on a different methodology again, also simply exploiting the multitude of networks that are out there. If you are working on a clicks based system, you need to be huge to compete and I am gladly letting that be handled by the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. But still, with this system, a lot of advertisers are left out in the cold, and I don’t think Google’s move to give companies a free web site to advertise on AdWords, will be a real change in this. There are just a lot of people out there who shouldn’t have to care about AdWords, conversion, optimization, multivariant testing, and the like.

All in all, this will be a good year for Yahoo! on the search/clicks marketing front and while I am not sure choosing ad rank based on CTR and Click Price increases the click price itself, it sure as hell increases the CPM, which is what sites really care about. The problem comes in with those networks going for the agencies and the big companies, and then the big publishers suddenly don’t want to play that game anymore, because the would rather talk to those companies directly, and get a lot more money out of them. It will be an interesting 2007. Let’s all have fun.