Yahoo's Right Media, LucidMedia team up on contextual advertising

Yahoo has struck an agreement with LucidMedia in a move to enhance contextual display advertising on its Right Media Exchange, the companies announced Tuesday.

The arrangement comes as Yahoo and its competitors, which rely heavily on ad revenue, face a challenging environment as the economy softens and advertisers pull back. With the agreement, Yahoo is seeking to grab market share from Google and Microsoft.

Under the agreement, Yahoo's Right Media will support buyers and sellers that use LucidMedia's contextual advertising engine ClickSense. The arrangement will allow Right Media users to categorize their display advertising inventory, using targeted tags for any of Yahoo's more than 60 vertical channels, such as automotive, finance, and sports.

"LucidMedia's ClickSense technology will significantly help increase the prospective yield of a publisher's available inventory and improve an advertiser's ability to contextually target ads to relevant content and categories through the Right Media Exchange," Bill Wise, Right Media general manager, said in a statement.

Contextual advertising has caught the attention of advertisers and, as a result, the companies that rely on advertisers for revenue. Microsoft, for example, is reportedly conducting a test to expand its AdCenter engine to allow small publishers to use contextual ads from the software giant. Google, meanwhile, operates AdSense.