Yahoo, Google and the Next Generation of Advertising

Via Feh!: Google Groups Beta
Slowly but surely Google is releasing services to compete with Yahoo. The strategy is simple…
Advertising is king of revenue again for online properties. Anyone who has read Google’s IPO prospective or watched Yahoo’s acquisition of Overture knows the dollar amounts involved. Today the model is built around targeted CPC (cost per click) advertising based on relevancy (i.e. if you were to run a search for Intel, you would receive advertisements for companies selling Intel equipment), tomorrow’s advertising is going to extend the relevancy model to included geo-location (where in the world is the eyeball) and next demographics (male/female, age, etc.).
Yahoo has the lead in this right now because they have a rich service with the Yahoo Mail and Instant Messaging products. Users are interested in signing up and filling out profile information to receive these services. Google is working like crazy to get this profile information on their user base. The friend network Orkut, gmail, picassa, groups, etc. are all geared towards making Google more sticky to the end user, and in turn giving Google more data.
Now all they needs is for a a few million profiles to be collected.