Yahoo details plans for new online ad sales system

Yahoo Inc on Sunday detailed plans for its forthcoming Web advertising management system that gives its ad sales-partners access to online ad space both on Yahoo and other major sites.

The widely anticipated system, known as AMP!, aims to simplify the process of buying and selling online ads for advertisers, ad agencies, fast-growing ad trading networks and Web site publishers.

The ad management system seeks to capitalize on Yahoo's strength as a Web site publisher that reaches 500 million Web users monthly and recent efforts to sell ads off of Yahoo through major partnerships or specialized ad-sales networks.

The planned advertising system, formerly code-named Apex, is the lynchpin of the company's strategy to reach outside its own base of users and increase its position as the "must buy" location for online advertisers.

While the strategy remains in its early stages, AMP! is one of the products which Yahoo management believes will help propel the Web pioneer's next wave of growth. It is also one factor behind Yahoo's reluctance to accept Microsoft Corp's unsolicited takeover bid currently valued at $42.4 billion, which executives believe undervalues the company's assets.

"This is really about creating a massively networked advertising ecosystem," Yahoo advertising executive Mike Walrath said in an interview. Walrath founded Right Media, an ad sales exchange, in 2003 and sold it to Yahoo last year.

AMP! will be introduced in stages starting in the third quarter of this year, Yahoo said. It aims to give individual sites the capacity to sell ads across the Web, replacing single-site systems that still use e-mail and even faxes.

The move also is a response to major competitors Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, which have each acquired major competitors in the market for sales of online display ads used by corporate brand marketers. Google closed its $3.4 billion acquisition of ad sales management firm DoubleClick last month. Microsoft paid $6 billion for aQuantive last May.

AMP! is a suite of tools that offers precise geographic, demographic, and interest-based targeting across a vast network of Yahoo sites and ad sales deals Yahoo has struck with more than 600 newspapers, Comcast and eBay Inc

It also includes niche Web sites such as WebMD, Forbes, the major ad networks, and thousands of smaller sites on the Web.

In its initial stages, AMP! is designed to expand the reach of dedicated sales forces at newspapers or sites such as WebMD to allow them to reach many times larger audiences outside of their own sites, where they can cross-sell their advertising.

Yahoo promises to 'amp' up ad platform

Yahoo Inc. believes it's poised to revolutionize online advertising after years of being outmaneuvered by rival Google Inc.

But the slumping Internet pioneer might not get the chance to show off the latest improvements to its online advertising platform unless it can convince increasingly impatient investors that the new approach will produce a bigger payoff than Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited offer to buy the Sunnyvale-based company for more than $40 billion.

Hoping to gain wiggle room, Yahoo is releasing more details about its effort to become a one-stop shop for selling and distributing online display ads — the Internet's equivalent of billboards.

The upgrade, called "Amp," won't be available until some time this summer, and then only on a limited basis among more than 600 newspaper publishers trying recover some of the revenue that the Internet has siphoned from their print editions.

Nevertheless, Yahoo will begin promoting Amp on Monday with an online video demonstration of a system that the Sunnyvale-based company promises will make it easier for advertisers to aim their messages at specific demographic groups across scores of Web sites.

"This is a revolutionary approach that will allow marketers and publishers to deliver a more compelling experience for consumers," said Hilary Schneider, Yahoo's executive vice president of global partner solutions.

Those remarks echo similar boasts that Yahoo's top two executives, Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, made at an online advertising conference in late February. At that time, the new system was still operating under the code name "Apex," short hand for Advertiser Publisher Exchange.

Amp will rely heavily on data that Yahoo collects about people's preferences at its own Web site as well as other online destinations. The practice, known as "behavioral targeting," has raised privacy concerns, but Yahoo — like rivals using similar tracking technology — believes consumers will appreciate seeing more ads tailored to their individual interests.

Yahoo's new platform will be competing against similar technology recently acquired by Google and Microsoft. Google bought DoubleClick Inc. for $3.2 billion primarily so it would have a better vehicle for selling display ads. The same objective drove Microsoft's $6 billion purchase of aQuantive.

Amp didn't cost Yahoo nearly as much. Besides relying on engineering developed by its own engineers, Amp draws on technology that Yahoo picked up by buying online ad service Right Media and Blue Lithium last year for a total of $781 million.

Selling advertisers on Amp may prove to be easier than convincing Yahoo's shareholders that the new platform is a better bet than selling to Microsoft, whose unsolicited takeover offer was initially valued at $44.6 billion, or $31 per share.

Yahoo maintains its franchise is worth a lot more, partly because of promising new advertising ideas like Amp.

But investors have reason to doubt Yahoo's judgment after two years of disappointing results.

"They have a little bit of a credibility problem right now," Jupiter Research analyst David Card said.

In a sign of the skepticism dogging Yahoo, Wall Street hasn't embraced the bullish optimistic outlook that the company released last month to illustrate why its board of directors rebuffed Microsoft's bid.

Yahoo projected its 2009 revenue, after subtracting ad commission, will total $7.1 billion, up 25 percent from this year. The company expects its 2010 revenue to climb another 25 percent to $8.8 billion.

Analysts have much lower expectations, with their average revenue estimates standing at $6.4 billion for 2009 and $7.4 billion for 2010.

Amp isn't the first advertising upgrade that Yahoo has touted as a financial catalyst. Last year, the company rolled out a much ballyhooed formula called "Panama" that was designed to do a better job of displaying text-based ads alongside online search results.

Although most advertisers applauded Panama as an improvement over the previous system, it wasn't enough to lift Yahoo out of the financial doldrums that have depressed its profits since 2005. The downturn opened the door for Microsoft's bid.

Just how much longer Yahoo can fend off Microsoft remains uncertain.

On Saturday, Microsoft said that if a deal was not reached by April 26, it would launch a hostile takeover at a less attractive price. If Microsoft pursues that option, Yahoo's annual shareholders meeting will be the most likely forum for the showdown. Yahoo must hold the meeting by July 12, right around the time Amp is supposed to debut.

Ancient stone tools found on Australia mine site

A large cache of stone tools estimated to be up to 35,000 years old has been discovered on the site of one of Australia's largest iron ore mines, sparking calls on Monday for the site's preservation.

Archaeologists uncovered the tools on the site of the A$1 billion ($920 million) Hope Downs iron ore mine, about 310 kilometres (192 miles) south of Port Hedland, in western Australia's ore-rich Pilbara region.

"We have always known this is an important part of our history, that our ancestors lived here," Slim Parker, a senior elder of the local Martidja Banyjima people, told Australia's Fairfax newspapers.

"Our stories and songs tells us this. It is a good feeling to know archaeologists have proved what we say is true. It makes us feel strong. Now we want this place preserved. It is part of our heritage and our culture," Parker said.

Archaeologist consultant Neale Draper said the Hope Downs site could prove to be one of Australia's most significant historical finds, and could yield more material up to 40,000 years old.

The stone tools, mostly makeshift blades and cutting implements, were found in a rock overhang. Carbon dating tests indicated some were much older than charcoal remnants from ancient campfires.

"The oldest-dated stone artifacts are a core, and associated flakes that have a radiocarbon age estimate of 35,000 years," U.S. archaeologist W. Boone Law said, referring to an implement resembling a stone spike.

He said the site was of international historical significance.

The Hope Downs mine, jointly run by Rio Tinto (RIO.AX>, the world's second-biggest ore miner, and Hancock Prospecting, is expected to have a yearly capacity of 30 million metric tons when a two-stage project is completed. Production from stage one began last year.

DISCUSSIONS ONGOING

Discussions are underway between the mine companies and the indigenous owners of the land, who wanted sensitive areas where Aborigines had lived for more than 1,000 generations protected from mining.

"We've been talking to them about altering the mine plan and I think have reached a tentative understanding to do that. It's off to the side of an expansion to the Hope Downs mine," a Rio Tinto spokesman told Reuters.

"In terms of any impact on the mine, it's rather hypothetical at this stage. We've reached a tentative understanding. There is not an actual mine there yet."

He said the company alerted indigenous people to the site after heritage surveys identified the overhang as of possible interest.

"We stopped work a couple of months ago and called in the archaeologists," the spokesman said.

Aboriginal culture and mining occasionally clash in Australia and the previous conservative government stalled for months before allowing construction of a A$12 billion LNG plant near 30,000-year-old Aboriginal rock carvings on the Burrup Peninsula, also in Western Australia.

Former prime minister Bob Hawke halted construction of a uranium mine at Coronation Hill in 1991 because of its association with a mythical creation beast called the Bula, sacred to the Jawoyn people in the outback Northern Territory.

Investigation of the Hope Downs site could also help in the understanding of climate change and how Aborigines had coped with an evolving climate, scientists said.