• Advertising Age, Monday, November 17, 2008 11:16 AM

Yahoo shares may have fallen from $33 to $10 in the past twelve months, but the Web giant is still far more valuable in the eyes of Madison Avenue than it is in the eyes of Wall Street. Indeed, size still matters to Madison Avenue.

"Advertisers are looking at where's the traffic, volume and value is today. And today is very positive for advertisers at Yahoo," said Chris Moloney, chief marketing officer at Scottrade. "Google is considered to be the 800-pound gorilla of the internet but it doesn't have content the way Yahoo does. It receives a massive volume of traffic." In fact, so big is Yahoo's audience base that Chrysler's chief marketing officer, Deborah Wahl Meyer, says she considers Yahoo "almost as a fifth (television) network."

Buying the home page is key. According to Chrysler, a home-page buy on Yahoo is worth 75 TV ratings points, or about four 30-second spots on a hit prime-time show such as ABC's "Desperate Housewives." Meanwhile, Wall Street is showing the stock, which is languishing in the $10 range, no love. Aimee Reker, senior VP-global director of search for MRM Worldwide, said she thinks Yahoo is "undervalued," noting that not only does Yahoo have scale, it has scale against its own content.

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