This analysis by Catherine Holahan does a pretty good job of showing how Yahoo's problems might be more than their new Panama ad-platform is capable of digging the company out of. The entire article is worth reading but the central issue is how there's so much ground to be made up before it's close to even with Google that simply redesigning the user interface might not be enough. Not only Google, but a number of other niche-players have entered the market and taken away ad dollars that otherwise would have gone Yahoo's way. That being said, there's a goldmine that's only beginning to be tapped in the form of the small sites the company hosts which can be populated with banner ads that often have higher rates of returns than search ads. [via TechCrunch]
