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! hopes to be where an individual’s world meets the larger World.

In theory Yahoo! is the most popular website in The World, but this does not seem to be reflected on the ground in the UK - where I don't think I know of anybody who actually uses Yahoo!  At AdStorm Advertising Agency We manage Pay Per Click Advertising on Google, Yahoo! and Facebook among others and the volume of traffic available – and, in our judgement the quality – is way lower on Yahoo! than on Google. 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 aspect of Yahoo!'s new website, it has opened up its home page to rivals such as Facebook and Hotmail – which is surely an admission that these third party social media solutions are in greater demand than its 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.

Yahoo!’s apparent prior vision - that of providing an all-encompassing range of interactive content has surely now been superceded by rivals Google and Facebook, Twitter and a range of emerging sites. Yahoo seems to be repositioning itself as a portal from where "best of breed" soultions can be accessed.