Yahoo! Talks Mobile Ads, We Postulate Its Future

As the months pass, it seems Google leaves Yahoo! further and further behind. And not because it’s technologically inferior to the megaforce of Mountain View. It can hold its own. Kinda.

No, such a perception exists primarily because of the continuous barrage of media coverage lavished on Big G. It just doesn’t stop. Day after day, there’s more and more talk about GOOG news and GOOG plans and GOOG predictions. Yang & Co can’t seem to get a word in. Sure, it now gets coverage as a result of its complicity in the jailing of a Chinese reporter/dissident, but when was the last time the company got front-paged in The New York Times, or some other internationally renowned publication, for a new technological development?

Well, today we ourselves will break with the Google bandwagon and give some due attention to Sunnyvale. In part because we feel a bit bad for them, getting passed over for so long and all. And also because it’s actually got another development to highlight. This one about mobile advertising.

“Mobile advertising, huh?” you say. Quite dull. Nothing a bit more intriguing to pull out of the hat? No new apps to speak of? No nifty inventions? Just stuff about ads?

Yep, mobile ads. (To be fair, Yahoo! did announce earlier this week a service dubbed Yahoo! Kickstart, a sort of hybrid LinkedIn/Facebook product. You can check out our take on that particular piece of kit here.)

Alright, lets get right into it then, shall we?

Mobile ads. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re coming. More and more of them are going to make their way to your pocket-sized browsers, and how ad networks and their engineers fare as far as their respective financial successes go means a whole heck of a lot for a great many people – as is true for today’s standard set of desktop browser-based advert networks.

So, naturally, Yahoo! wants to carve out for itself a great big portion of the burgeoning market, to have and to hold, forever and ever, while it still can.

If we’re honest, it’s not got much of a chance to change its fortunes on the full-sized Web, so it’s really gotta bet quite a bit on making itself a whopper of a contender in the mobile arena. Otherwise it’s just going to get softer and softer, ever to remain second in line to the industry throne. And that won’t be something its investors will logically tolerate for many more years to come. To do so would not be in their interest, and few, I imagine, wish to lose money.

But can Yahoo! pull it off? Can the company really come to be a long-term commanding force in the burgeoning mobile ad industry? If I’m honest, I fear not.

Why not? Well, lets consider a very obvious point. Google is king. In search. In Web ads. In most everything where big money is found. And regardless of how quick out the gate Yahoo! may be with its mobile initiatives (its Yahoo! Go services are quite superb, I’ll give it that), it’s no doubt going to be hugely tough for #2 to make #1 really start to sweat. It just doesn’t have the heft, the great weight that GOOG carries to the plate. And that’s hard to ignore, regardless of how much smarter or more advanced Yahoo!’s stuff might supposedly be. (Of course, we’re not saying those things are true, but even if they were, the company still faces major hurdles.)

Sure, Yahoo! might surprise and really take to the mobile world with a fervor and a determination to conquer the mountain. But, come on, that’s pretty unlikely. As fun as it is to bet on the underdog, there’s a reason this particularly pooch has remained in second place for a good half-decade or so.

I hope, for the sake of being witness to a very interesting and highly competitive future, Yahoo! does manage to pull that massive rabbit out of the proverbial hat. Yet I can’t help but think Google will do the same in the mobile world as it did in the non-mobile one.

Come on, Yahoo!, disprove that presumption. We dare you.

Let us know what you think Yahoo!’s mobile future. Dish in the comments below!