Yahoo gives Google some competition

Yahoo announced a beta test Wednesday of an ad network that would allow small publishers to place contextually relevant text ads on their web sites.

The move puts Yahoo in direct competition with Google, which has dominated the growing market for blog ads with its AdSense product.

The announcement, which had been talked about for some time was big news in the blogging community. While Google generally has a good reputation in the online world, the thought of it getting some competition seemed to delight bloggers, who speculated that Yahoo's move could lead to better features and higher payouts for customers, as the companies duke it out.

Blog community response:

"This is some pretty important news as it puts forth a significant effort by Yahoo to compete with Google's AdSense program that offers a self serve service for publishers to monetize content rich web sites."
--Online Marketing Blog

"This represents Yahoo??s competition to AdSense, and don't be surprised if initial payouts are higher than Google??s to be very competitive. Yahoo would be wise to take a smaller cut than Google, because most publishers will be testing it out on the only criteria that matters: Money earned from Yahoo versus money earned yesterday from Google."
--Inside Google

"Google ad layouts are totally inflexible, not to mention boring. Let's hope Yahoo lets bloggers decide where ads will run, and what categories they want to run, or not??"
--BL Ochman's Whatsnextblog

"Sounds like a good war is on the cards between Yahoo and Google. Which can only be good news for the Consumer I would have thought."
--Burts osCommerce & More Blog