Gawker: valleywag, right media

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)

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.:

Microsoft's master salesman feigns neutrality

Owen Thomas — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:06:18 EDT

Kevin Johnson, who runs Microsoft's Windows and Web businesses, is a master salesman. And making a sale, of course, requires a fine-tuned ability to bullshit on demand. Nowhere is that ability more on display than in Microsoft's announcement of a deal to buy AdECN, a supposedly neutral marketplace where advertisers and publishers can buy and sell online ads. AdECN is also a competitor to recent Yahoo acquisition Right Media and DoubleClick, which Google is trying to buy. Johnson claims Microsoft won't favor its own websites, or partners like Facebook or Digg. Of course, that's nonsense. How do I know that? AdECN told me so.

Here's a pitch an AdECN marketer emailed me a couple of months ago:

I wanted to point out something that is not being discussed much at all (yet) by the media during the current consolidation of the ad exchanges. With the purchase of Right Media and DoubleClick by two of the paid search and display ad giants in the industry, both of these firms will no longer be in a position to offer neutral, independent auction-based exchanges for the buying and selling of interactive ad inventory. Why?

Due to these firms "having a dog in the fight" by owning their own ad networks, it will be virtually impossible for them to not favor their own proprietary ad display outlets when ad inventory is being bought and sold. Worse, it would appear that it will be next to impossible for ad networks using these exchanges to be certain that their interests are being fairly and consistently represented. Also, because these exchanges allow advertisers, ad agencies and publishers to also trade directly on their systems, ad networks are threatened not just by Right Media-Yahoo! and GoogleClick's own ad network activities but by their own customers now being empowered to bypass them.

By buying AdECN, in other words, Microsoft destroyed its main selling point. A pity Kevin Johnson won't be able to tout AdECN's purported neutrality in signing up advertisers. As lines of bullshit go, it's not a bad one. But it's still bullshit.