MediaFile

Cheaper? Easier?!??? Those words are the lifeblood of the advertising community.

Now Chief Executive Jerry Yang is using them to tout Yahoo’s new advertising system, telling Reuters in an interview that the so-called APT will make life better for advertisers and publisher.

“This system allows cross-selling between sales forces, it allows us to have visibility of what pricing is happening and where,” Yang said in the interview.

What Yahoo wants is a system as efficient for online display advertising as the one run by Google in search advertising. APT will roll out in the fourth quarter, and from early 2009, will place Yahoo’s own inventory on the system as well as other publishers and advertisers. Yahoo has teamed with nearly 800 newspaper websites.

But can they pull it off? That remains to be seen. As Ben Schachter, analyst at UBS says, “Given Yahoo’s scale and position as the leader in online display advertising, it is Yahoo’s position to lose. The problem is, given Yahoo’s execution history over the past few years, we are afraid that they could lose it.”

Whose kids are these, anyway? A new survey released by Scholastic Corp, the U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books, shows that book publishers, newspaper proprietors and massive forest logging concerns have a future:

75 percent of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, “No matter what I can do online, I’ll always want to read books printed on paper,” and 62% of kids surveyed say they prefer to read books printed on paper rather than on a computer or a handheld device.

And if you think that that dastardly Internet is going to turn the minds of children to pulp, guess again, the study says: