Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo, the top worldwide Web destination and the second-most-used Internet  search engine, has revealed information about a future online advertising system called AMP, that it hopes will help make it easier for advertisers, publishers and partners to sell various types of Internet advertisements throughout the Web, Yahoo announced Monday. The AMP advertising management platform has been undergoing testing since the middle of 2007, and is expected to launch in late summer or early fall, Yahoo said. AMP Derived From Project Apex Users of the AMP online advertising management platform, derived from a Yahoo system called Project Apex first announced in 2007, will be able to place graphical banner ads on both Yahoo's Web properties, which are viewed by over 500 million people monthly, as well as on other major Web sites in the company's expanding network such as Forbes and WebMD, and thousands of other small sites, Yahoo said in a statement released Monday. Apex, formed from the phrase Advertiser and Publisher Exchange, had been revealed at a meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau in February, and moves forward with its new name AMP as of Monday. A SearchEngineWorld image to the right shows an example of certain preview portions of the AMP system. Yahoo released a video demonstration of the AMP system Monday, that showed how advertisers will be able to target specific audiences based on geographic location, certain online usage history and other demographic criteria. Some members of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, a group of 634 newspapers begun in November 2006, have begun testing the new AMP online advertising system, and Yahoo expects these to be the platform's first users when it is rolled out in stages later this year. Building On Right Media, BlueLithium Acquisitions Jay Smith, president of Yahoo Newspaper Consortium member Cox Newspapers, commented on his company's testing of the new Yahoo AMP platform. "We are highly enthusiastic about the potential of  this platform," Smith said in the Monday Yahoo statement. "We're blown away by how Yahoo is working with intensity and commitment to create a collaborative and very efficient platform that we expect will have a significant impact on our sales capabilities. This is a turning point for our industry. And, we are equally excited about the tremendous value Yahoo sees in our great local newspaper content, which is getting broader exposure nationally on some of Yahoo's most popular sites," Smith added. AMP, which stands for Advertising Management Platform, hopes to take advantage of several major Yahoo partnerships, and is built on technology from several acquisitions including its 2007 purchases of Right Media, for $680 million, and BlueLithium, along with work done by Yahoo itself. Over 500 Yahoo engineers are believed to be working on development of AMP, Smith said. The AMP system will replace the existing online ad-management system used by the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, and Yahoo hopes that it will increase ad revenue and outpace the online ad market as a whole over the next three years, the company said. Top Web Players Vie To Be One-Stop Ad Shop Yahoo's Monday announcement of its AMP platform, which will be open to any participant, comes as rivals such as Google, Microsoft and AOL have all made moves aimed at expanding the reach of their online ad systems, especially in the graphical banner ad category that has hitherto been dominated by Yahoo. Last month Google finalized its $3.1 billion purchase of online advertising company DoubleClick, and in 2007 Microsoft agreed to purchase aQuantive Inc., the Internet's largest interactive ad agency, for $6 billion, while Time Warner's AOL purchased Tacoda, a company specializing in targeted online advertising. Yahoo hopes to attract advertisers, ad networks, publishers and ad agencies with the ability to perform all online ad management tasks from within the AMP system, including monitoring the performance of ad campaigns, in a method Yahoo said would be "dramatically simplifying" the way the current systems work. "While online advertising grows more sophisticated, the process of doing business today is surprisingly cumbersome and manual," said Hilary Schneider, Yahoo executive vice president of global partner solutions, in the Monday Yahoo statement. "AMP from Yahoo will enable advertisers and publishers to connect with each other and their exact target audiences across the increasingly fragmented Internet, in a way that's not possible with current solutions. We believe AMP will deliver a faster, easier, and more automated and integrated way to create, buy, and sell advertising and do so across a transparent global marketplace. And with the time saved, the industry can better focus on developing great creative," Schneider added. Yahoo Shows Plans For New AMP Web Advertising System Yahoo's AMP announcement comes as it faces an unknown future with Microsoft seeking to buy it through an unsolicited bid. Saturday Microsoft warned Yahoo that it would pursue more aggressive means should Yahoo not accept its offer, to which Yahoo responded Monday noting that it is open to Microsoft's bid if the price is high enough. So far Microsoft has refused to increase its bid for Yahoo. During an earnings conference call in October 2007 Yahoo chief executive and co-founder Jerry Yang told analysts that online advertising of both all types would be important to the firms future. "We believe having a principal position in both search and display advertising is critical to creating [...] long-term shareholder value," Yang said. Yang has said in the past that he would be opposed to a Yahoo sale to Microsoft. Related Links:
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