Maybe Mike Walrath, the former Right Media CEO and current Yahoo ad-tech executive, should postpone his move to headquarters. Publishers who run ads sold through Right Media say that the network takes too long to serve their ads to site visitors. How long? 300 to 1200 milliseconds. That doesn't sound like much time, but Google's Marissa Mayer told a conference in 2006 that Google loses 20 percent of its users when the site's response time reaches half a second. Yahoo confirmed the issue when contacted, telling VentureBeat : "With rapid growth, we’ve also faced some recent performance issues with latency of ad serving. We are in the process of resolving these issues. " (Photo by Steven Kreuzer)

How badly did Yahoo's departing SVP Todd Teresi want out of the company? AdAge reports the former head of Yahoo's ad-network business took an offer to become chief revenue officer for startup Web metrics firm Quantcast, which doesn't sell any product yet and faces entrenched competition from Nielsen, ComScore and Hitwise, among others. To hear it from Teresi, it doesn't sound like the company has any clear idea on what its eventual product will be."We're not going into the ad-network business, so to speak," Mr. Teresi told AdAge. "We look at how we enable the existing players to have a better digital-advertising opportunity." We're sure Teresi's telling family and friends that its the thrill and flexibility of startup life that prompted the move. And yes, probably startup life is better than working for the doomed to depart in disgrace Sue Decker these days. But we're still betting that when Teresi saw top management's new favorite exec former Right Media CEO Mike Walrath was moving to the Bay Area, Teresi went back and listened to a few old saved messages from a headhunter or two.

How swiftly executives fall from management's good graces at Yahoo. Just last year, Todd Teresi was promoted to run all of Yahoo's display-ad "marketplaces" — the electronic systems which gather bids from advertisers and place banners on websites, both on Yahoo and off. In May, he squired Yahoo president Sue Decker to a meeting with Dow Jones executives at the Wall Street Journal's D6 conference in May. But in this spy shot of that meeting, note how Yahoo president Sue Decker is looking away from Teresi. Could she have been planning, even then, for his exit? Teresi's likely replacement: Mike Walrath, who is moving from New York to the Bay Area. Walrath characterized his move to us as a "lifestyle" decision, not a sign of some corporate reshuffling. Having a rival out of the way does make one's life easier, that's for sure.

Despite losing its lead engineer and complaints that it's been underfunded, Yahoo's dashboard for brand advertising buyers — first called Apex, then AMP and now goes nameless — is ready to roll out this September, the New York Post reports. The story's source is Yahoo exec Mike Walrath, who will move to San Francisco around the time AMP launches this fall. "We understand there is a fair amount of skepticism outside of the company," Walrath told the Post. "Inside of the company, the reason the confidence level is so high is we're not just building a piece of software to be innovative. We are potentially the biggest customer of this software." Nothing personal, but we'll believe it when we see it, Mike.