Earnings: Yahoo’s Semel Says If AOL.com Works Should Be Good For All

Still parsing Yahoo’s Q2 analysts’ call — they covered a lot of ground — but one comment from Chairman Terry Semel especially stands out. Asked about the potential impact of AOL’s free portal on Yahoo’s advertising, Semel replied: “First, it’s hard to know how that’s going to work, let’s be positive about it and let’s assume it works quite well. From that standpoint, there’s no such thing as one broadcast network, there’s no such thing as one cable network. It really will help the overall situation of attracting more and more large advertisers whose budgets are quite enormous as it relates to what they currently are spending on the internet. So, in a nice way, we wish them well. We think in an overall sense it would encourage large advertisers to step, buy more than one network and have more opportunity to have more inventory and reach larger audiences on the internet. So we see it as a positive move and, for their sakes, hope that it’s effective.”
(Does the phrase “damning with faint praise” come to mind?)Semel didn’t thank AOL for bumping Yahoo’s own Q3 ad revenues up as an advertiser; the Time Warner subsidiary is investing heavily in search advertising to promote the new web portal. At about 43 minutes into the webcast.

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