Yahoo launched Panama

Without exaggeration, one of the most anticipated events in the Internet industry happened on Tuesday. Yahoo finally decided that its long-term - contextual search advertising system, code-named Panama - is ready for publication, and has opened access to it for all its customers, including new ones. Prior to this, since Panama left the test state in October, only existing advertisers could evaluate it.

Here and here we already talked about this software platform, which replaces the one that was purchased in 2003 from Overture. Since then, for three years now, the direction of contextual advertising has been a priority and the most profitable for Yahoo. But since the beginning of 2006, when it became clear that updating the tools of advertisers that the company provides them was postponed for a long time, Yahoo began to rapidly lose customers and with them the weight of its shares.

The launch of Panama should reduce the gap between the company and its main competitor in the online advertising market - Google, and protect it from advancing on the heels of Microsoft, with its most advanced adCenter advertising platform today .

Panama gives potential users some interesting and sought after features. First of all, this is a set of settings to maximize the relevance of ads and clear planning of the effectiveness of the advertising campaign and its costs even before it starts. The advertiser will now be able to indicate the specific region, the inhabitants of which he would like to convey information about himself, as well as familiar with the forecast in advance about how many clicks on advertising links he will receive depending on the budget of the campaign and the subject of the ads.

But the main thing in the system is an improved engine, which will be much more accurate in determining what kind of advertising should be shown on each specific page, analyzing its content. Now, in the most conspicuous place, those commercial blocks will be shown that best correspond to the text of the page, and not those for which the most money was paid.

Older Yahoo customers will be able to upgrade to the new platform at any time during the first quarter of next year. Thus, they are given better time to take a closer look at the new product. But Steve Mitgang, vice president of search advertising, believes hundreds of thousands of Internet giant partners will take this step as soon as they can. “In recent months, we haven’t lacked extremely positive reviews,” he said in a telephone interview with Yahoo News , “The reaction was“ Wow! ””