TAC-ky
Card thinks that Yahoo signing more big name publishers in their network is a good thing. I think with the recent news, I’ll call these Madonna deals: that is, a great headline, financially destructive and be able to fool the most gullible of publications into thinking that this is the future of music or in Yahoo’s case, “don’t count it out versus Google”.
Yahoo should let Google and Microsoft slobber all over ad representation deals like MySpace and Facebook. If there is a bubble anywhere in the industry, they are in revenue guarantees to up and coming sites.
Yahoo needs to stick to its knitting. If they concentrate on growing Yahoo properties, they will win. Indeed: “Our page views were up about 20% in the quarter. Those wouldn’t include any page views from off-network companies or anything. That’s the O&O Yahoo! properties.”
That was the most encouraging sentence in the entire earnings call.
Compared to this: “As we’ve indicated for the last couple of quarters, we continue to face headwinds related to rising TAC rates and to our traffic quality efforts in our affiliate search business. ”
Translation: These deals are getting done at higher cost and for shittier quality of traffic.
What rollercoaster does Yahoo want to hop on?
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