Convergence Partners Working On It

Yahoo Inc. has rolled out a list of partners to help the company bring the Internet and television together.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo said it has forged deals with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., LG Electronics Inc., Sony Corp., Vizio, and others.

Applications will deploy for a wide array of Web activities, such as watching videos on Google Inc.'s YouTube.com, social networking on News Corp.'s MySpace.com, tracking stocks and sports teams, buying and selling on eBay, messaging friends using Twitter, or using e-mail or other Yahoo's applications.

Yahoo, which has lagged behind larger rival Google in the Web search market, plans to finesse the technology to also sell advertising, according to a report from Reuters.

Information Wealth, Targeted Growth

Inside the new J.P. Morgan Global Equity Research report Nothing But Net: Outlook for Global Internet Stocks is the prediction that the mostly performance-based U.S. search ad market will rise "10 percent in 2009 to nearly $16 billion. In contrast, display ads, which includes both performance and branded advertising, will grow only 6.3 percent to $8.4 billion this year."

"Yahoo! is particularly well positioned to provide targeted advertising to a network, in our view. As one of the top-ranked websites by unique visitors (according to comScore), Yahoo! has a wealth of information about visitor habits and preferences.

"We also think it will take time for generalized non-targeted inventory to catch up to the monetization of targeted premium inventory."

Online video ad growth is on the brink of healthy gains in 2009. But, unlike television, which still can count on advertisers to respond to CPMs (advertising bought on the basis of impressions), online video can't guarantee viewership for any specific video the way TV does. (Holding up growth are factors such as uneven quality and copyright issues.)

One model to watch is Google experiments with how to monetize YouTube videos. A viewer searches, then watches a favorite tune video, then can click on a link to buy that song or related product from Amazon or iTunes or others, with a percentage going to YouTube.