Pundits who were wondering what Yahoo would do to stay alive during a shrinking Internet advertising market can find their answer on the company's homepage. The company's brilliant innovation: replace some of the content with ads.
That might sound like hyperbole, but it really isn't. In order to show off the power of the Ford Explorer, the Ford ad debuting on Yahoo Friday featured some pretty "immersive" animation.
First, birds slowly flap across the screen. When they land and you click on them, your speakers emit a crunching sound and your browser window jitters maniacally, and, finally, an Explorer drives over the left half of the screen and sits there, covering Yahoo's directory listings.
What's the deal with this kind of advertising? Is it Yahoo's new MO?
Nicki Dugan, a spokeswoman for the company, said that it's part of an expanding set of "options" the company is offering its advertising clients. She said that while she couldn't talk about the specific ads that users will see on Yahoo in the future, more ads like these -- which have been called "takeover" or "roadblock" ads -- will likely be part of the mix.
This Explorer piece is actually the second such ad that Yahoo has featured on its front page. On Oscar night this year, the company featured a similar plug for Pepsi.
Dugan said that so far the user feedback for the ads has been positive, and she suspects this has something to do with the fact that the ads are "fun."
"People seem to like the interactivity," she said.
The Explorer ad continues the recent trend of content companies giving away more and more of their Web pages to advertisers. Earlier this year, CNET, Salon and Yahoo began placing ads directly into the body space of articles -- in the past, the sites featured only banner ads that sat above or beside the content.
Yahoo, following in the footsteps of every other major search engine, also began a "sponsored links" program in which advertisers pay for being listed near the top of a search results page.
Yahoo saw its revenue drop 20 percent during the first quarter of 2001 from the previous year. The company announced it will cut 12 percent of its workforce and it recently replaced CEO Tim Koogle.
