Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo has stepped up efforts to sell its two most important initiatives, with president Susan Decker looking to draw support for the Web pioneer's proposed search advertising deal with Google, while chief executive and co-founder Jerry Yang sought to tout the benefits of Yahoo's new digital advertising system APT. The two efforts, one planned but under increasing scrutiny from anti-trust regulators, and the other launched last week, were regarded by Yahoo and industry observers as vital to the firm's future financial health. Decker Looks To Provide "Much-Needed Clarification" On Google Deal Decker, who assumed a larger role at Yahoo amidst a June reorganization that sought to stabilize the company after struggling with Microsoft's attempted takeover, was speaking out in support of Yahoo's proposed advertising agreement with Google in a rare message posted Friday on the company's official blog. The proposed agreement, which could extend as long as a decade should all optional renewals take place, would allow leading search engine firm Google to provide ads alongside search results from the second most popular search engine firm Yahoo, as well as on some of its United States and Canada Web properties. In a statement Decker said she wrote in order to provide "some much-needed clarification" to the proposed Google deal, the Yahoo president pointed out widespread "confusion and misinformation" over the agreement, and offered to further explain some of its particulars, so that consumers could "move past the false rhetoric being peddled by some of our competitors." Microsoft has led the opposition to a Yahoo tie-up with Google, maintaining that such a digital advertising powerhouse would wield an inordinate 90 percent share of the market. "Any definitive agreement between Yahoo and Google would consolidate over 90 percent of the search advertising market in Google’s hands," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said in an April statement. "This would make the market far less competitive," Smith added. Decker pointed to a facet of the deal that would place ads from Yahoo and Google into online auctions that other firms would be open to take part in - a measure unsuccessfully put in place to try to help gain the approval of both U.S. and European Union antitrust regulators. Not Setting Search Term Pricing With Google, Decker Says "Let me be absolutely clear that we are not in any way going to be coordinating or setting search term pricing with Google," Decker wrote in the Friday message. Maintaining that Yahoo by itself is not able to "provide relevant paid search ads for every search," Decker looked to make the case for a  Google deal she which said offered "marvelous potential [to] the marketplace." "The fact is that advertisers set prices by bidding in our real time auctions," Decker added of the plan that would see Google AdSense ads shown alongside Yahoo search results should it receive the approval of regulators in the United States and Europe. The proposed Google deal was facing review by regulators at the U.S. Justice Department and attorneys general in eleven states, as well as European Union regulators. Decker said that the proposed agreement would not hurt its own search advertising business, and said that "we have no intention of abandoning our key advertiser relationships." "[The agreement] will not use Google ads in a manner that would create a significant risk to the health of our own sponsored search business," said Decker, who also painted the deal as a way to give advertisers more search queries from which to earn money. Bringing In Revenue From Underutilized Search Queries "One of our key goals is to unlock the huge value of the hundreds of thousands of less popular queries that don’t show ads Yahoo today," Decker said Friday of the agreement, which would see Google helping to "backfill" ads for certain queries. "Queries for which we have no coverage, low depth, and/or low relative monetization are all circumstances in which backfilling probably makes sense -– they indicate that Yahoo is not currently delivering enough value for that inventory. If Google can deliver that value where we currently don’t, then everyone wins -– including the advertiser and the consumer," Decker said. Acknowledging that even if the proposed agreement were to receive the approval of all the regulators investigating Yahoo, revenue increases were unlikely to come immediately, and Decker said that the company hoped to "increase revenue by building query share, which takes time." The message Decker delivered in her blog posting Friday came on the heels of a strong push by Google to sell the deal. Last week the Mountain View, California-based search giant launched a Web site dedicated to explaining the proposed agreement, and also issued several statements to that effect. Decker said that the Google deal would give advertisers "a new opportunity to bid for placement on an additional network that includes Yahoo inventory," and said that it would not change the way pricing presently works. "They will bid for what they think this opportunity is worth at prices that produce positive ROI [Return On Investment]," Decker added Friday. Yahoo President Decker Defends Deal With Google While CEO Yang Touts APT Platform While Decker attempted to shore up support for the Google deal, Yahoo leader Yang has been touting what he sees as the advantages of the company's new APT online ad management platform, which launched to a group of select partners last week. The APT platform, which has been undergoing testing since the middle of 2007 when it was know as Project Apex, hopes to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell online display advertisements throughout the Web as a sort of one-stop-shop. APT lets advertisers 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 large network including those of some 800 newspapers throughout the United States. Yang said getting newspapers to use the new APT system will be a key challenge. "A big part of what  we have to do with newspapers is training the sales force to sell on the system," Yang said in a recent interview with Advertising Age. Calling Yahoo's sales team "probably the No. 1 sales force on the Internet," Yang said APT has the advantage of being such a large platform. "We put our inventory into APT, and to the extent that APT has more advertisers, more agencies, more publishers and their sales forces putting in advertiser demand or liquidity, Yahoo being a publisher will benefit from ads running on Yahoo," Yang said. Among the members of WebmasterWorld, one of the oldest and most popular Web sites serving mostly the technically-savvy people who manage Web sites and specialize in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), reaction to the Yahoo APT platform was mixed. "How do you succeed in becoming a stronger competitor when you sell out a good proportion of your inventory to the market leader," a WebmasterWorld member using the handle "TinkyWink" wrote of the proposed Yahoo agreement with Google. "It is troublesome to rely on your dominant competitor for even some of your income," added another member of the venerable message forum using the handle "physics". Related Links :
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12:31 am on Sep. 30, 2008 (utc 0)