Yahoo! Content Ads Exceptionally Irrelevant

After hearing a few people mention the NBA finals I went over to Yahoo! Sports to check it out. The Celtics are ahead of the Lakers 1 game to 0. Given the history of that rivalry it is no surprise that decent NBA Finals Tickets are selling for over $1,000 and courtside tickets fetch $20,000 or more. Yahoo! paid the editorial costs to create great content relevant for this high profit margin niche, and what do they do with it? They waste it.

How are these ads relevant to an article about the NBA finals? Mind you this is Yahoo!'s own editoral content located on sports.yahoo.com, so it can't be hard to make an algorithm a bit more relevant than that.

Given Yahoo!'s irrelevancy it is no wonder that they are heavily reliant on arbitrage and syndication - they need those players to add relevancy to their broken ad platform. At least the people who are paying for the clicks care about a relevant experience, though one would imagine Yahoo! could earn more with an honest attempt at relevancy.

Published: June 9, 2008 by Aaron Wall in yahoo

Comments

palconit
June 9, 2008 - 1:40pm

It's good that most of our PPC budget is spent on Adwords.

pritam_g_barhate
June 10, 2008 - 8:43am

You wrote in the post-

so it can't be hard to make an algorithm a bit more relevant than that.

Exactly! I think partly Google’s no. 1 position is not because it is good. But they are no. 1 because their competitor’s are not half as good. When will Microsoft learn that it is not the deal with the Yahoo, but a better search engine is what is needed to compete with Google?

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