NEW YORK — Yahoo launched a much-anticipated upgrade to its online-advertising system Wednesday as it tries to bring to graphical display ads some of the innovations that powered Google’s rapid rise in search marketing.
Playing to Yahoo’s strengths in display ads and technology targeting pitches to users’ interests, the new “Apt from Yahoo” platform will initially involve just the newspaper companies in a 2-year-old consortium led by Yahoo.
Many of the papers joined that effort hoping for relief from the decline in their industry.
The platform, renamed from Amp because of a trademark conflict, is intended to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell display ads, borrowing self-service techniques that have made text-based search ads lucrative for Internet companies, especially Google.
By tapping data Yahoo already collects on users’ locations, demographics and surfing habits, Apt aims to help advertisers narrow their pitches to specific groups of customers because sharper targeting will let websites charge more for ads.
William Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive with ap, publisher of The Denver Post and chairman of The Associated Press, said the typical newspaper now sells more than half of its inventory at deeply discounted rates because it can’t offer such specific targeting.
Singleton said Apt should help eliminate or reduce the need for deep discounts.
“If we can sell the amount of online advertising we are selling today at rates that were much more normal, you wouldn’t be hearing people talk about the woes of the newspaper industry,” Singleton said at a launch event during the ad industry’s Advertising Week.
Online advertising at newspapers has been growing, but too slowly so far to compensate for steep declines in print advertising.
Yahoo is initially offering the platform to the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, both near the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. It will extend Apt to the 782 other newspapers in its consortium over the next several months and will open it to other sites, including its own, and to advertisers in 2009.
The Mercury News is owned by ap.
The company said it will eventually open the system to rivals, too, so companies such as Google, Microsoft and AOL can add inventory available through their existing networks of websites. Yahoo already has a deal with Google on search ads.
