Following up on yesterday’s post, an article in AdAge yesterday points out another reason why the Yahoo vs. Google war is soon going to tip the scale away from the media-anointed king, Google. Yahoo has the wind against it back with market trends: “rich-media advertising, driven partly by video technologies and certainly buoyed by consumer uptake of broadband, is predicted to surpass search marketing as the largest-spending online category this year.”

John Battelle has eloquently drawn a distinction between Yahoo, the media company, and Google, the media company. Because of this difference, Yahoo, culturally and structurally, is better positioned to ride this trend towards rich-media advertising. In short, the company has a leg up in catering to this set of advertisers in the coming year or two. Look for Google to make some moves to play catch up in this race, but Yahoo is already in the driver’s seat.