Yahoo! Casts a Wider Net

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An online giant can't stand still, especially when it's being chased down.

Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) announced several new deals this morning, all geared toward broadening the company's advertising reach. Whether it's populating Wal-Mart's (NYSE: WMT) website with display and video ads, jumping into the video distribution fray with CBS (NYSE: CBS), or arming retailers with the ability to reach consumers through personalized newspaper circulars, Yahoo!'s welcome flurry of activity today is entirely intentional.

Yahoo! needs to keep moving. It has two months left before its annual shareholder meeting. Now that Carl Icahn has made it clear that CEO Jerry Yang will be dismissed if Icahn's slate of new directors wins in August, Yahoo! has two months to defend its life. Thankfully for Yang and the company, it's hard not to like the three deals that Yahoo! revealed today.

Running graphical ads on Walmart.com's pages may seem counterproductive, but Wal-Mart is taking Web traffic so seriously these days that it just launched a free online classified site.

Getting into circulars may be a bit of a stretch, but Yahoo! has been warming up to newspaper companies as partners for a couple of years now. It makes sense for Yahoo! to give old-media concepts a new-media spin.

Joining the CBS Audience Network is a greater benefit to CBS than to Yahoo! on the surface, giving the media conglomerate a broader reach for its syndicated content. However, the deal will also give Yahoo! sticky content, keeping its users closer to home when they're hungry for prime-time video.

Yahoo! can use as many of these deals as it can ink, but they must also ultimately translate into bottom-line gains. Earnings fell at Yahoo! last year on a mere 8% uptick in revenue. This year is off to another uninspiring start.

Now that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has temporarily suspended its acquisitive pursuit of Yahoo!, the pressure is on Yang and Co. to prove their organic worth.

Of today's three deals, the Walmart.com arrangement strikes me as the most important. Yahoo!'s affiliate revenue -- generated by outsourcing its ads through third-party websites -- has fallen for several quarters in a row, in sharp contrast to the ever-growing success of Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) rival AdSense platform. Wherever you stand on the merits of Wal-Mart itself, there's no denying that its website is a hotbed of deal-chasers, especially during the holidays.

With the Yahoo! deal in place, Wal-Mart should be inspired to find new ways to grow its traffic, a move that will obviously benefit both companies.

Keep on trucking, Yahoo! Those people chasing you aren't slowing down any ... and they look pretty angry.