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Yahoo's To Launch Mobile Ad Network

Light years behind rival Google's massive Web ad network, Yahoo has smartly decided to bring the same idea to the emerging cellular phone market. Early Tuesday, the Sunnyvale, Calif. giant announced plans to create a mobile ad network. It would allow marketers to place ads not only on its mobile services, but also those of its publisher partners.

So far, Yahoo has just three publishers in its network: MobiTV, a mobile video service, Opera, a maker of Web browsers, and Go2, a Yellow Pages site. To encourage more publishers to join, Yahoo is offering customization tools, including oneSearch, its new search software introduced this year, in addition to text and image ads.

"We are being very aggressive on mobile and moving extremely fast to get the building blocks in place," said Steve Boom, Yahoo's senior vice president for broadband and mobile. "We felt that business services for publishers is something that was lacking." Mobile search, in fact, is the one search-related area not dominated by Google.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »

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