A Man, a Plan, a Canal...

It's now been two months since Yahoo! unveiled their new search marketing program, the one known as Panama and something like two weeks since they started rolling the thing out. After having Google eat its lunch for the past couple of years with everything related to textual and search advertising, Yahoo! hopes that Panama will be a worthy competitor to Goog's Adwords in the text advertising space.

The new program bases its ad rankings not only on the money bid for the specific keyword(s) but also takes into account the potential click-through rate for the ad. The idea being that the new system will maximize ad revenues per ad.

I've been waiting to see how the rollout will affect Yahoo's fortunes. I have a soft spot in my heart for the perennial #2 of the Internet world. The big question is whether Panama will be enough to turn Yahoo's stock around, especially compared with Google. (Business Week seems to think no, Arrington hopes yes).

I subscribe to the school of thought that Panama will be good for everyone. More choices should mean more advertising dollars will migrate online.

Has anyone out there started using the new system? Any comments to share?

Comments

[Ron Mertens]

We're still waiting for Yahoo to open their publisher program to people from outside the US. If Yahoo continues to ignore the rest of the world - it's not going to be easy to compete against Google. (Which makes a lot of money from the AdSense program, and obviously it really helps their AdWords inventory).

Ron.

[Ron Pick]

Panama has few features that give it real advantage, you can say they are only now up to par.
all this also makes little relevance, their is no traffic on Yahoo (expect Japan).