Like Google, Yahoo also has about 800 Newspaper partners. "We’re seeing good momentum with the Newspaper Consortium deployment on Apt, Yahoo!’s ad management platform, with 34 newspapers from 9 media holding companies already live on the platform," she tells me.

In fact, just a couple weeks ago, A. H. Belo became the first media holding company in the consortium to have all its newspapers on Apt. Other points of interest that Yahoo shared include:

- The cross-sell program (newspaper sales forces selling Yahoo! inventory) is seeing some good successes. Several newspapers have already sold $1 million in ads.

– The majority of the newspapers’ weekly sales revenue is now transacted on Apt.

– Apt enables the Newspaper Consortium to aggregate more inventory, and the platform’s superior behavioral targeting capabilities enable the newspapers to charge higher CPMs.

– Behavioral targeting has been accounting for a rising percentage of the Consortium’s total weekly sales, currently 70% to 80% of total sales.

-  They’re also seeing a share shift to newspaper online ads, from outdoor and broadcast.

– Small newspapers are faring well, proving that ad revenue is not necessarily tied to circulation.

– To boost traffic to the newspaper sites, Yahoo! distributes local news headline links across our properties. The links take users directly to the full articles on the newspaper sites. As of December 2008, Yahoo! sends an average 17 million referrals a month to the 300 newspaper sites participating in the content distribution program. We’re very close to topping 200 million referrals. This means a wider local audience reach and more inventory for advertisers. A.H. Belo’s Dallas Morning News says that the headline placements on Yahoo.com can account for up to 27% of a day’s page views and up to 65% of a day’s unique visitors.

Make of this information what you will, but Yahoo clearly saw an opportunity to shine in an area where Google is faltering, and wanted people to know about it. Yahoo doing better than Google in some areas is not a totally crazy concept. Last I checked, they were dominating in the email department as well (although Gmail market share is growing).

APT, as the platform is called, used to be known as AMP.  It’s been portrayed as a company-saver for some time, but at least one sign of trouble appeared when the person in charge of developing it (Adam Hyder, Senior Director of Engineering) left Yahoo entirely.  Launch dates were also ominously omitted from all discussions.

 

Now, Yang describes APT on Yodel Anecdotal by writing, "It’s simple.  It’s open.  It’s fast (like minutes vs. days).  It provides a new level of control.  It offers cross-selling more easily than ever been before.  It will provide large amounts of quality inventory.  It will help advertisers customize and target their messages more precisely through advanced targeting.  And it will drive results.  All this from a single online application. No more cobbled together processes or impressions."

William Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews Group, agreed with these assertions during a presentation at the Advertising Week conference.  Members of Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium will act as the next collection of APT testers, while other publishers and companies are scheduled to get their shots next year.

We may not see what Yang would view as a best-case scenario: APT allowing Yahoo to beat Google.  But considering Yang’s big boasts and the fact that many folks still want him to step down, APT could lead to an industry-changing development in one way or another.