Overture / Yahoo PPC Review

Overture practically pioneered the PPC industry. Their system has grown over the last few years with the acquisition by Yahoo and competition from the Google AdWords program. They have several things in their favor:

Syndication - Yahoo, MSN, NetZero, CNN, ESPN and others. Yahoo/Overture has an impressive reach.
Syndication Options - Yahoo/Overture offers you the option to exclude syndication of your ads to its content match partners if you prefer to list your ads only on the sponsored search network.
Reporting - Yahoo/Overture offers excellent reporting capabilities to help track your PPC campaign(s).
Fraud Filters - Yahoo/Overture does a good job of preventing click fraud from draining your monthly advertising budget.

However, there are some drawbacks to advertising with Yahoo/Overture:

Disclosure - Yahoo/Overture does not list all their syndication partners or offer you options for excluding distribution of your ads to specific syndication partners.
Cost - Overture can be very expensive for some keywords.

Informal research indicates that Yahoo/Overture advertising offers a ROI almost as good as Google's AdWords. However, Overture has partnered with Claria (formerly Gator Corp.). There is no effective measure of the risk of alienating web savvy visitors for doing business with a pop-up/pop-under advertiser.

Now that Microsoft is building their own PPC program, it is highly likely that MSN will drop Yahoo/Overture in the future. When that happens, it will diminish Overture's reach significantly.