Yahoo launches major upgrade to display ad system

Playing to Yahoo's strengths in display ads and technology targeting pitches to users' interests, the new "Apt from Yahoo" platform will initially involve just the newspaper companies in a 2-year-old consortium led by Yahoo. Many of the papers joined that effort hoping for relief from the decline in their industry.

The platform, renamed from Amp because of a trademark conflict, is intended to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell display ads, borrowing self-service techniques that have made text-based search ads lucrative for Internet companies, especially Google.

By tapping data Yahoo already collects on users' locations, demographics and surfing habits, Apt aims to help advertisers narrow their pitches to specific groups of customers because sharper targeting will let Web sites charge more for ads.

William Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive with MediaNews Group Inc. and chairman of The Associated Press, said the typical newspaper now sells more than half of its inventory at deeply discounted rates because it can't offer such specific targeting.

Singleton said Apt should help eliminate or reduce the need for deep discounts.

"If we can sell the amount of online advertising we are selling today at rates that were much more normal, you wouldn't be hearing people talk about the woes of the newspaper industry," Singleton said at a launch event during the ad industry's Advertising Week.

Ken Doctor, media analyst for the research firm Outsell Inc., said newspaper Web sites are too small to do much targeting by themselves. Sales through the Yahoo platform, he said, is one of the newspaper industry's top growth potential in 2009.

It's unclear whether the technology will give Yahoo the lift it needs. A previous technology revival focusing on search ads, called Panama, failed to resonate with Wall Street despite accolades from advertisers, and Yahoo has remained in a funk, its stock recently sinking to its lowest level in nearly five years.

The new platform comes at an inopportune time because advertisers are pulling back spending as the U.S. economy weakens, said David Hallerman, a senior analyst with eMarketer.