Yahoo! hopes to carry on, doctor

NEWS Web portal Yahoo! has revamped its online health site in an effort to attract advertising revenue from the pharmaceutical industry. Yahoo! Health will offer information and resources for a number of ailments such as high cholesterol, breast cancer, diabetes, weight loss and depression. Each topic centre will include facts about symptoms, links to prescribed medication, news headlines, and additional content from other areas throughout Yahoo!. Yahoo! hopes the site will attract advertising from the pharmaceuticals industry, as part of it continued drive to make more money from its portal services. Yahoo! recently increased its emphasis on paid services and is stepping up efforts to showcase the potential for advertising on its properties. David Mandelbrot, vice president of entertainment and media at Yahoo!, said: "We've lost sight of the fact that lots of areas on Yahoo! have proven to be a great advertising medium." The hard part for Yahoo! and other web media companies is to convince mainstream advertisers that the Internet is as effective as television and newspapers. By all accounts, Yahoo's advertising business remains in a slump. Last quarter, the company reported a four per cent decline in its marketing services revenue, which largely consists of online advertising, from the previous year. Minus a revenue-sharing deal with Overture Services, which pays Yahoo! when people click on its preferred search results, Yahoo's core advertising business declined 19 per cent over the same period, according to Justin Baldauf, a Merrill Lynch analyst. Yahoo! will report its third-quarter revenue in October. Although the company is expected to show solid gains in its subscriber base, Wall Street still will be paying close attention to signs of an advertising recovery. Earlier this week, some Wall Street analysts published investor notes expressing confidence that Yahoo! would report a solid quarter. Jim Hu writes for News.com