With all the craziness surrounding Yahoo, there was a feeling about its Right Media Exchange that it had not taken advantage of its early lead in the exchange arena and had fallen behind. Now, with a new deal to provide exchange services for AOL, Yahoo wants to flip the script.
Brian Silver, the newly named vp of marketplaces at Yahoo, is crowing about a big win to handle the Class 2 inventory for AOL, one of its partners in an ad alliance with Microsoft. It is a big expansion of the amount of inventory within the Right Media Exchange.
“A myth in the market is that Right Media and Yahoo are so in line with each other that there’s preferential treatment Yahoo gets that the rest don’t receive,” Silver said. “It couldn’t be further from the truth. AOL is another premium brand will hopefully further dispel.”
In Silver’s telling, Yahoo is perfectly positioned to be an alternative to Google’s Ad Exchange and Microsoft-backed AppNexus as a neutral player for matching up buyers and sellers in a safe private exchange environment.
“The misconception is people think Yahoo let [Right Media] die on the vine and allowed it to be behind in technology and in investment,” he said. “That’s completely wrong. We’ve proven again and again that there’s a careful balance between the self-service technology tools to partners and a strong professional services team that propels success for them. There’s an amazing amount of value here for supply and demand seat-holders.”
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