Yahoo Misses ‘Panama’ PPC Launch

Posted: July 19, 2006

The new features of Yahoo Search Marketing’s Panama project have been widely discussed and speculated upon. Terry Semel made it public yesterday that the launch of the new system will be delayed until Q4.

It seems that many inside Yahoo have been as uncertain of the launch dates as those outside of Yahoo. No wonder they’re are not many answers. We’ve already had several conference calls with Yahoo about the new API, new interface, new features, etc - and had always been led to believe that August 15th was the launch date. In fact, I had heard that launch date as far back as Q1 of this year.

It seems Yahoo set an aggressive date, tried to keep that date both publicly and internally, and then in the end - just couldn’t hit it.

Yahoo shares fell yesterday after they failed to meet ad sales expectations (and for your internet PPC geeks, many of their sales are CPM based, they have one of the best CPM behavioral buys around). The new Panama system will increase Yahoo’s inventory and profitability - something they sorely need as shares fell after the news was made public.

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