Are newspapers going to surrender entirely the Internet advertising market?

Maybe here's a respite for them to get their act together. I wonder if the NYT Co. has a K street lobbyist, which firm it is, and what they're doing about this anti-trust case?

Google and Yahoo delay search ad partnership

By Diane Bartz
Google Inc and Yahoo Inc have decided to delay implementing a controversial search advertising partnership, Yahoo said on Friday.
"The companies have agreed to a brief delay in implementing this agreement to continue our ongoing discussions with the (U.S.) Department of Justice," Yahoo said in a statement. "We have had discussions with regulators and look forward to responding to their questions about this agreement."
Google issued a similar statement.
"When we announced our advertising agreement with Yahoo in June we agreed to delay its implementation until October to give regulators time to look at the details. As we are still in conversation with the Department of Justice we have agreed to a brief delay in implementing the agreement while those discussions continue," the company said.

The delay was expected to last less than a month, a source familiar with the discussions on the issue told Reuters. "We're still looking at the time frame of October," the source said.
The deal, which allows Google to sell advertising for some of Yahoo's online advertising space, is unpopular with advertisers who fear higher prices. Google's web-search market share widened to 63 percent in August, while Yahoo dropped to 19.6 percent and Microsoft Corp slipped to 8.3 percent, according to comScore Inc.
Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, said his organisation was opposed to the pact. "We're gratified that Google and Yahoo are delaying," he said.
Google uses an algorithm that aims to match consumers with what it says are the most appropriate ads, a formula some advertisers find mysterious and bothersome.
The deal announced in June to share advertising was widely seen as an effort to help fend off Microsoft's efforts to acquire Yahoo, by bringing Yahoo an additional $800 million in annual revenues.
An antitrust lawyer, who regularly brings mergers to the Justice Department, said that the delay was probably not a good sign for Google and Yahoo.
"It means that they were not going to get a clean bill of health in time, and perhaps it's much worse than that. They don't want to go forward and be told that there's potentially a very serious problem there," said the lawyer.
There had been previously been signs that the planned partnership was running into trouble with the Justice Department, in particular reports that the agency had brought on board top litigator Sandy Litvack to work on the deal.
Litvack was the department's antitrust chief under former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Walt Disney Co's former vice chairman.
Google has argued the tie-up means Google and Yahoo could work together to improve the chances that consumers will be more likely to get ads for products they will want to buy -- thus giving advertisers more bang for their buck. It has also said that since it sells its advertisements by auction that it has little control over prices.

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Who is going to crack the internet advertising sales market?

Good question, and one for another day.

In the meantime, this:

Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: September 24, 2008

Yahoo announced on Wednesday the details about its system to buy and sell display advertising online, with the hope that the company can dominate the display ad market in the same way Google steers the search market.

William Dean Singleton of MediaNews, left,

Sue Decker, president of Yahoo,

and Jerry Yang, chief of Yahoo, on Wednesday.

The new platform, called APT, will allow both publishers and advertisers to manage display advertising across the Web sites of several hundred newspapers across the country, along with Yahoo sites and large sites like eBay and WebMD.
At an event at Advertising Week in New York, executives said that the 800 or so members of Yahoo’s newspaper consortium would be using the system, formerly known as AMP, by the end of the year.
For advertisers, the new system would simplify the buying of display ads. Currently, advertisers typically buy display advertising from individual sites, or use ad networks, where they do not always control where their ads appear. If the platform develops as Yahoo promised, it would allow newspapers to make more money from online advertising. National advertisers do not want to make hundreds of tiny purchases, and the APT platform would make member newspapers’ Web site space available to national advertisers through one national purchase.
It would also let publishers use Yahoo’s targeting capabilities for ads on their sites, and use the demographic and behavioral information Yahoo has about users to show them appropriate ads. That “allows us to charge more” for the advertising space, said William Dean Singleton, the chief executive of the MediaNews Group, at the event.
Publishers can also allow Yahoo and other newspapers to sell their ad space as long as it meets a minimum price. For example, if a publisher knows his sales force can get $1 per thousand impressions on a certain ad unit, he might allow partners to sell it if they can get $1.25 or higher.
The San Jose Mercury News and The San Francisco Chronicle have been testing the system, and the next users will be Cox Newspapers, the MediaNews Group and Scripps Newspapers. In 2009, Yahoo will offer APT to advertisers, agencies and advertising networks.
“It’s going to be all about the execution of getting scale into the system — can they convince advertisers and publishers and agencies that this is the way to go?” said Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with UBS Securities. “If they can succeed with that, then clearly there will be enormous rewards.”
Google, AOL and Microsoft, however, are all trying to develop their own versions of display advertising platforms. And Yahoo has problems: the Yahoo management team has been criticized by analysts and investors for not agreeing to an acquisition by Microsoft, its stock recently hit a five-year low and the Justice Department may be preparing to challenge a search deal with Google.
“In general, you can’t give this team the benefit of the doubt,” Mr. Schachter said.
Yahoo executives showed a preview of the system at the event. It featured a report center, a display of campaigns running, search capabilities and the ability to preview how an ad will look on a given site.
If Yahoo can use its data well, said Darren Herman, the head of digital media at the Media Kitchen agency, “they can target, hopefully, much more effectively, and when I’m calling up for an advertiser, they can give me the exact audience I want.”
Mr. Herman said, however, that Yahoo had made promising announcements for years, “but then it gets lost.”
Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s chief executive, said in an interview after the event that Yahoo and its partners would “benefit from all that liquidity in the marketplace.”

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