14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo hasn’t been shy about ads on its properties. It’s the largest display advertiser on the web, though it has been trying to decrease the number of ads in favor of better quality ones. Still, it looks like even Yahoo is finding new places to run ads and it’s not the first thing you’d think of. It is now running full-page ads on the login page, surprisingly or not, one of the most trafficked pages it owns.
The login page attracts about 26 million visitors daily, according to comScore numbers, apparently the third most visited page on Yahoo, after the homepage and Yahoo Mail. Yet so far, it has remained blank, safe for the login box and instructions. Of course, most other services, at least the big ones, do the same, so there’s no surprise here.
Media Memo now reports that Yahoo has started selling the login page as ad space. The ads themselves cover the entire page, or rather background, and are served to all visitors, from a particular region, for a full day, what are known as “takeover” ads. The company is not saying how much it’s charging to ‘rent’ the login page, but it’s apparently selling a similar type of ad for omg!, its celebrity gossip site, for $80,000 per day. omg!, while a very popular site in its own right, only gets about 20 million visitors per month.
Yahoo started off with an ad campaign for Chevy, very likely, US-only. As far as ads go, these actually look pretty nice. And they’re some of the biggest ads you’re bound to see online, at 1,400 pixels wide. Still, the login page is probably not the best place to run an ad. People use it to, well, login and want to get past it as fast as possible. But that may not be a problem for a display ad, which doesn’t necessarily need to have the people engage with them, just for them to remember the message.