Online Media of the Year: Overall Winner Yahoo

Category: Overall

Owned by: Yahoo Inc.

Co-founders: David Filo, Jerry Yang

Chairman and CEO: Terry Semel  

Managing director SE Asia: Tom Sipple

Head of trade marketing and research SE Asia: Roger Moy

The phenomenal uptake of online advertising in recent years is scarcely a surprise, given its plethora of advantages. Firstly, online advertising has the potential for delivering personalised messages to targeted individuals while at the same time, magically possessing the ability to reach a vast audience at rapid rate. Thirdly, online advertising has allowed for limitless expression of creativity in the development of increasingly eye-catching, exciting, and interactive advertisements in the constant fight for click-through and eyeballs. The opportunities are boundless, as more and more marketers have come to realise.

Needless to say, the advantages of this form of advertising have translated directly into deciding factors for marketers when it comes to choosing where to advertise. Marketers are typically concerned with exactly who and how many target audiences the websites can help them reach (and on a higher level, how innovatively) in a bid to get the biggest bang for their buck.

The first two factors mentioned are clearly evident in this year's overall winner of Online Media of the Year - Yahoo, which has fared consistently well across the board in terms of mindshare amongst Singaporean client marketers and agency professionals. No other website in our research has exhibited Yahoo's strong showing in all categories - holding 2^nd, 4^th and 4^th place rankings in the search site, business site, and IT news site categories respectively.

We know from previous experience that three major players - Yahoo, Google and MSN have always dominated the search site category. No prizes for guessing who came up tops this time around. Yahoo and Google established a clear lead ahead of MSN (1,034 and 1,092 total points scored respectively, as compared to MSN's 285 points). Henceforth, the pertinent question was whether Yahoo or Google would emerge tops in the search site category and we're pleased to say they each prevailed in their own way.

Although Yahoo garnered the most number of votes (451 votes as compared to Google's 419 votes) as a search site, it was routinely placed one ranking behind rival search site Google. This resulted in its slight lag behind in terms of the points accrued overall, culminating in its 2^nd placing right behind Google which garnered the most number of points by merit of it being the most frequently first-ranked website in the category.

The curious phenomenon occurred consistently across the board whether respondents were classified by agency/client side, regional responsibility or gender. There were, however, two notable disruptions to this uniformity, the first being that client and agency CEOs, managing directors and general managers tended to favour Google over Yahoo, casting more votes and ranking Google 1^st place. The second interesting variation was in Yahoo's dominant 1^st place ranking in the financial services industry where respondents gave it 20 votes in the 1^st place and 13 in the 2^nd place.

These findings seem to indicate that Yahoo still has some work to do in catching up with Google in terms of being the search site that people would be willing to part with their dollars for, although it has done an excellent job in retaining top-of-the-mind recall amongst marketers.

The above is by no means a new problem that Yahoo has had to tackle. Yahoo Inc. had a less than stellar time last year in 2006, when it was reportedly facing woes with plunging revenue and its fight to stay ahead of rival Google Inc. in the search engine marketing sector.

Yahoo's woes have since been incrementally tackled by way of several moves, one of which included its recent efforts to tap on the full potential of social sites by way of Project Panama, a system whereby ad placements are based on price and relevancy of ad in February this year. It remains to be seen how these long term strategies will pan out in Yahoo's fight to be on top.

Despite the problems it faces, Yahoo has reason to celebrate. By the looks of this survey, Yahoo has managed to establish a firm foothold in other areas despite its strong affiliation as a search site. Yahoo's presence as a business site is all the more laudable because the difference in points between 1^st and 4^th rankings (difference of a mere 104 points for business sites as compared to 916 points for search sites) was more gradual, indicating keener competition between more equally qualified competitors.

Unlike in the search sites category, agency respondents who voted for Yahoo in the business site category tended to rank it 1^st rather than 2^nd place. The same went for client respondents.

If we divert our attention away from the two heavyweights in the IT news site category that are HardwareZone and CNET, we can see pretty keen competition between Yahoo and locally better known news sites Channel NewsAsia and SPH Asiaone. Yahoo fell only two votes behind Channel NewsAsia and gained an equal footing with Singapore Press Holdings Asiaone in terms of vote numbers. In fact, Yahoo was ahead of SPH Asiaone in terms of points garnered overall. By regional responsibility, more respondents with local responsibility ranked Yahoo 1^st while Channel NewsAsia pulled in more numerical votes from respondents with regional/international responsibility.

Bolstered by this edge in versatility, top-of-the-mind recall amongst marketers, and its long-term strategies to cope with competition, there can be no doubt that Yahoo is well equipped to handle the challenges ahead for a long time to come.