Yahoo vs. the AP. Which will emerge the victor?

Yahoo’s ongoing experiment with newspapers to sell behavioral-targeted and geo-coded advertising may help determine whether a “hyper-local” business model can be established to go along with the geo-coded content model provided being developed by services such as EveryBlock.com, Outside.in, or Topix.

Around 150 newspapers in the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium are reportedly experimenting with Yahoo’s ads at present, with another 350 poised to do so soon. Estimated ad revenue produced so far this year via Yahoo’s platform sits at $50 million, so it is still a relatively small piece of the overall newspaper advertising pie, which (though falling) sits at ~$35 billion a year.

But, just like with eBooks, this segment is fast-growing and filled with tremendous upside potential.

Poynter’s David Johnson has raised the provocative question, “Is Yahoo creating a new kind of Associated Press by going directly to newspapers for both news and advertising content?” Certainly, the AP has been raging against The Digital Monster Eating its Lunch lately, but many, including me, have assumed the main object for its wrath was Google.

Perhaps not. Plus, given reports that the AP now intends to build its own news portal, something that sounds a lot like what Yahoo did back in the ’90s, the outlines of a high-stakes battle between the old aggregator vs. the new are now coming more clearly into view.