SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Yahoo is beginning to pull the wraps off an online advertising system that the company said would help it and its partners drive sales of graphical and other premium ads.

Yahoo said the system, called AMP and still months away from being ready, would greatly simplify the task of selling online ads, allowing Yahoo’s publishing partners, for instance, to place ads on their own sites as well as on Yahoo and on the sites of other publishers in the company’s growing network. Advertisers will be able to focus those ads by demographic profile, geography and online behavior, the company said.

Yahoo is developing the system as other Internet giants, including Google, Microsoft and AOL, are all stepping up their efforts to become sellers and brokers of all types of ads on sites across the Web. Many analysts expect Google, which recently completed its acquisition of the ad-serving specialist DoubleClick, to begin making inroads into the market for graphical ads online, which Yahoo dominates.

“This gives Yahoo a little leadership in vision,” said Rachel Happe, an analyst with IDC, a consulting firm. But Ms. Happe noted that Yahoo’s last big advertising project, a platform known as Panama and intended to reach people searching the Internet, was plagued by lengthy delays. She said it would be “problematic” for Yahoo if it were not able to deliver AMP on time.

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Yahoo executives first discussed the new system publicly in February at an Interactive Advertising Bureau meeting, calling it the Advertiser and Publisher Exchange. Yahoo executives, trying to convince shareholders that a bid by Microsoft to acquire the company underestimated Yahoo’s worth, said the new system would help Yahoo outpace the growth of the online graphical advertising market over the next three years.

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Yahoo has begun showing the system to publishers in its newspaper consortium, which includes hundreds of daily and weekly newspapers. Those newspapers are slated to become the first users of AMP, which Yahoo expects to begin rolling out in the late summer or in the fall. The New York Times Company’s Regional Media Group, which includes 15 newspapers, is a member of the consortium.