There's been no shortage of hype surrounding new products at Yahoo over the past 18 months, but with the company still struggling to regain its footing after a nasty takeover bid from Microsoft, all eyes are on the launch of an overhauled display ad platform the company announced this week.

At the heart of Yahoo's new platform, dubbed APT, are about 800 newspaper publishers the company has been working to put together into something akin to an ad network. If successful, APT will allow advertisers to make simplified national ad buys in one place and manage those campaigns as they run on the digital versions of the country's leading newspapers. In addition to a simplified buying and management process, Yahoo will also be able to offer advertisers its targeting technology across the network.

This isn't exactly uncharted territory for Yahoo, which has been trying for some time to put together its newspaper consortium. But having just escaped an acquisition from Microsoft, and with Carl Icahn now on the company's board, the pressure is on to deliver results. Add to that the fact that Google, Microsoft and AOL are all working feverishly on similar products and you get a sense of what's at stake for Yahoo.

But for now, Yahoo seems to have an early lead. The San Jose Mercury News and The San Francisco Chronicle have been testing APT for the past few months and Yahoo is planning to bring on Cox Newspapers, the MediaNews Group and Scripps Newspapers shortly. Down the road, Yahoo says it has plans to offer access to APT to independent ad networks, but that's not slated to happen until sometime next year.