Gawker: valleywag, mike walrath

Yahoo's sluggish ads cost websites precious milliseconds

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:40:00 EDT

Maybe Mike Walrath, the former Right Media CEO and current Yahoo ad-tech executive, should postpone his move to headquarters. Publishers who run ads sold through Right Media say that the network takes too long to serve their ads to site visitors. How long? 300 to 1200 milliseconds. That doesn't sound like much time, but Google's Marissa Mayer told a conference in 2006 that Google loses 20 percent of its users when the site's response time reaches half a second. Yahoo confirmed the issue when contacted, telling VentureBeat : "With rapid growth, we’ve also faced some recent performance issues with latency of ad serving. We are in the process of resolving these issues. " (Photo by Steven Kreuzer)

Quantcast poaches departing Yahoo exec

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:20:00 EDT

How badly did Yahoo's departing SVP Todd Teresi want out of the company? AdAge reports the former head of Yahoo's ad-network business took an offer to become chief revenue officer for startup Web metrics firm Quantcast, which doesn't sell any product yet and faces entrenched competition from Nielsen, ComScore and Hitwise, among others. To hear it from Teresi, it doesn't sound like the company has any clear idea on what its eventual product will be.

"We're not going into the ad-network business, so to speak," Mr. Teresi told AdAge. "We look at how we enable the existing players to have a better digital-advertising opportunity." We're sure Teresi's telling family and friends that its the thrill and flexibility of startup life that prompted the move. And yes, probably startup life is better than working for the doomed to depart in disgrace Sue Decker these days. But we're still betting that when Teresi saw top management's new favorite exec former Right Media CEO Mike Walrath was moving to the Bay Area, Teresi went back and listened to a few old saved messages from a headhunter or two.

Ad exec Todd Teresi out at Yahoo

Owen Thomas — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:20:00 EDT

How swiftly executives fall from management's good graces at Yahoo. Just last year, Todd Teresi was promoted to run all of Yahoo's display-ad "marketplaces" — the electronic systems which gather bids from advertisers and place banners on websites, both on Yahoo and off. In May, he squired Yahoo president Sue Decker to a meeting with Dow Jones executives at the Wall Street Journal's D6 conference in May. But in this spy shot of that meeting, note how Yahoo president Sue Decker is looking away from Teresi. Could she have been planning, even then, for his exit? Teresi's likely replacement: Mike Walrath, who is moving from New York to the Bay Area. Walrath characterized his move to us as a "lifestyle" decision, not a sign of some corporate reshuffling. Having a rival out of the way does make one's life easier, that's for sure.

Report: Yahoo's company-saving ad platform still on schedule

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:40:00 EDT

Despite losing its lead engineer and complaints that it's been underfunded, Yahoo's dashboard for brand advertising buyers — first called Apex, then AMP and now goes nameless — is ready to roll out this September, the New York Post reports. The story's source is Yahoo exec Mike Walrath, who will move to San Francisco around the time AMP launches this fall. "We understand there is a fair amount of skepticism outside of the company," Walrath told the Post. "Inside of the company, the reason the confidence level is so high is we're not just building a piece of software to be innovative. We are potentially the biggest customer of this software." Nothing personal, but we'll believe it when we see it, Mike.

Tech's most awkward prank: the singing telegram

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:40:00 EDT

Why do so many people in tech deliver singing telegrams? Because they're so painful. My colleague Jackson West ventured this explanation: "Tech people are uncomfortable enough in the real world — raising the discomfort level and then blogging it for laffs provides a tail-eating narcissistic kick." Plus, it's a passive-aggressive sadism that can be documented in video and posted online. In the clips below, watch singing telegrams get delivered to prominent New York VC Fred Wilson, Yahoo ad exec Mike Walrath, and NextNewNetworks cofounder Timothy Shea. Watch and feel the heat rising on the back of your neck.

Victim: NextNewNetworks cofounder Timothy Shea

Victim: Yahoo ad exec Mike Walrath

Victim: Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson

Yahoo's New York star relocating to Sunnyvale

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:00:00 EDT

Former Right Media CEO and current Yahoo SVP Mike Walrath is moving offices from New York to Sunnyvale in October. He told Valleywag it's "a quality of life decision." If the move means a big promotion — a tipster tells us that's the rumor around Yahoo's New York office — Walrath wouldn't say. He's already in charge of Yahoo's advertising marketplaces group, requiring plenty of facetime at headquarters. But we think a promotion is likely, and deserved. So does a fellow Yahoo executive who told us Walrath is a particular favorite of Yahoo president Sue Decker and her closest lieutenant, Hilary Schneider, to whom Walrath currently reports.

Yahoo acquired the 80 percent of online-advertising exchange Right Media it didn't already own for $680 million in 2007 — a jawdroppingly high sum which made former Right Media executive Brian O'Kelley giggle, since Yahoo had bought the first 20 percent at a $200 million valuation only months before.

If Yahoo executives think they overpaid, no one's holding it against Walrath. The acquisition is the centerpiece of Yahoo's strategy to turn the company into a central place for buying online advertising. Transforming Yahoo's ad-selling operations from a conventional salesforce which sold ads on Yahoo's websites to a marketplace where banners are traded like bushels of corn has been a particular obsession of Decker's.

Adman Scott Symonds, whose employer, whose AKQA agency brings clients to Yahoo's advertising, told us he hopes the rumor of Walrath's promotion is true: "Yahoo has made some integration moves, but I think Yahoo can be even more aggressive leveraging these network properties and exchanges they purchased." One Yahoo speculates that Walrath's move to headquarters could be bad news for Mark Morrissey, another SVP in charge of advertising product management. Judging by how Walrath coolly handles a dancing, singing, rapping man in a chicken suit in the video embedded below, he's well prepared for life at 701 1st Ave, Sunnyvale, Calif.: