Oh, Yahoo, that's just rich

Yahoo celebrated the fifth anniversary of its own home-brewed search engine this week, and to mark the occasion they're folding multimedia ads into the sponsorede-links mix -- a big step for the company's ad program.

According to Jeff Sweat at the Yahoo Search Marketing blog (from which the above image is borrowed with thanks), the new system had a test run with a limited group of advertisers late last year, and that group saw great improvement in click-through rates -- as much as 25% in some cases. Advertisers are trying a big of everything with the new system; Pedigree has video, while another advertiser might choose to go with their logo or even an interactive element (though the example Yahoo gives -- a search -- leads to headache-inducing thoughts of recursivity).

Exclusivity is the name of the game for now, though. Yahoo's ready to talk about the new system, but for now, participation in Rich Ads In Search is invitation-only. Tuoc Luong and Larry Cornett, Yahoo's SVP for Search Engineering and Vice President of Consumer Products for Yahoo Search respectively, hint that more changes to the ad network are on the way... but no one's saying yet when those will appear, or when the doors on the fancy stuff will be flung open.