Yahoo Announces Gemini

By Tinuiti Team

Mar 10 2014

Yahoo introduced Yahoo Gemini, the world’s first & only marketplace for both mobile search & native advertising. Why the name Gemini? Gemini is Latin for twins & it’s simply a play on words, that Yahoo is bringing together these 2 concepts of mobile & native advertising.

The Facts: On March 10^th for select advertisers who are currently running mobile & tablet on YBN (Yahoo Bing Network) Yahoo Gemini will start running 1% of mobile & tablet ads through Yahoo. While this only includes traffic on yahoo.com and search.yahoo.com, which does account for almost 2/3^rd of the traffic on the YBN. Yahoo’s goal is by end of month to have a 100% of the traffic run through Yahoo Gemini.

All campaigns will be managed through Yahoo Ads Manager, formerly known as the Stream Ads platform, Yahoo’s new buying platform. Yahoo will be migrating yahoo.com & search.yahoo.com eligible campaigns into Yahoo Ads Manager. Since this is new, Yahoo is allowing you to manage campaigns across both the Bing & Yahoo platform. So for those who work with a bid management tool, while there currently isn’t an API, you can make your changes in your bid tool, they will push out to Bing AdCenter & then ported into Yahoo Ad manager. Don’t fear Yahoo is working with preferred partners to track via their APIs.

What Does This Mean for Yahoo?

All facts aside what does this mean for The Search Alliance, Yahoo Bing Network, Yahoo, MSN? Well if you ask me it sounds like Yahoo is pulling away from Bing. Into their 4^th year of partnership, it sounds like Yahoo has asked for a separation, which will ultimately lead to a divorce. It’s not surprising for those of us who have been privy to this relationship since the beginning, the signs have been there with 2 supports teams, 2 different ways to manage advertisers within Bing, either the account is Yahoo managed or Bing managed. What it also tells me is that at least for now Yahoo & Bing don’t agree with Google when it comes to device targeting. For Yahoo & Bing mobile is tablets & smartphones, while Google stands firm that tablet is not mobile.

For all advertisers I highly recommend you work with your agency or Yahoo team to get more information. Something tells me that there is more to come this year, even this month.