Viable Threat to Google Adwords Emerges

About damn time. It's not like adwords has some of the attributes that certain markets exhibit, making competition very difficult:

- Vendor lock-in - it's easy to swap out one set of ads for another.

- Positive network externalities - there aren't (big) network effects involved in ads.

Sure, there are some scaling issues, and some issues with regards to determining what the page is 'about', but those don't seem like insurmountable problems for reasonably large companies to deal with.

All the companies rage about developers and third party development, but it looks like Yahoo might actually step up and open up their system when Google is keep a closed shop.

It's nice to see the Yahoo web 2.0 crowdsourcing strategy extends beyond just buying shiny websites.