Yahoo! today announced a worldwide advertising campaign to coincide with the launch of its new home page. According to Elisa Steele, Yahoo!’s chief marketing officer, Yahoo! intends to be the website where each individual’s world meets the wider outside World.

Yahoo! is the most popular website in The World according to many sources, but I question whether this is true in the UK - where I don't think I know of anybody who actually uses Yahoo!  I used to use the groups functionality but that is a long time ago.  At AdStorm Advertising Agency we manage Pay Per Click Advertising on Google, Yahoo! and Facebook among others and we find that the volume of traffic availableis way lower on Yahoo! than on Google. And the quality of clicks is sometimes questionable too.  The only saving grace is that the volume of traffic is so low that many advertisers overlook Yahoo! altogether, reducing the competition for keywords thereby providing some good value for money.

In a key change to Yahoo!'s new website it has made its home page open to rivals such as Facebook and Hotmail, enabling users to access best of breed solutions from a single location.  But this is surely an admission that these third party social media solutions are in greater demand than Yahoo's own. This may yet bring a strategic advantage over Google, which only lets users customize their iGoogle home page but doesn’t provide any external links on the core home page - unless of course keywords or phrases are entered and searched for, in which case organic search results and online advertisements are shown.

It used to seem that Yahoo! was aiming to provide an all-encompassing range of interactive content through the Yahoo website but this has surely now been superceded by rivals Google and Facebook, Twitter, myspace and a range of other emerging sites. It now looks like Yahoo is realigning itself as a central point of access from where each user can access their preferred external websites.