Yahoo! Search Marketing on the way out?
It looks like Google and Yahoo are no longer going to be advertising across each others advertising placement and Pay Per Click (PPC) systems due to the looming threat of anti-trust action by the US government (our Competition Commission equivalent in the UK). With the two Search Engine companies holding over 90% of the market it was viewed as being anti-competition and it was going to be strongly contested in court. So Google have decided to avoid this completely and terminate the agreement.
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The two flavours of advertising systems on offer are these PPC – This allows you to create an advert and bid to appear for specific keyword searches. Depending on how much you are willing to pay and the relevancy of your advert and its landing page. Determines where you appear in the list of other advertisers. Advert Placement – This where you can earn money by reserving an area on your website for these adverts to be placed. Here are the top three systems Google call their PPC system ‘AdWords‘ and their advertising placement service ‘AdSense‘. Yahoo!’s service is called ‘Yahoo! Search Marketing‘. Microsoft have a system call ‘adCenter‘. |
The problem with this is it means that Yahoo stand to lose out on a large part of the market and thus lose revenue.
Yahoo’s earlier decision to turn down an approach by Microsoft to merge their advertising services would have solidified their position. But it looks like a much poorer offer would be put on the table if they were to revisit that idea. Microsoft may even wait to see if Yahoo get into difficulties and then pick up the pieces.
I think we need competition in this market as that is what has driven the rapid development of the Internet up to this point. Rarely has it been non-profit organisations being responsible for ground breaking advances affecting the way we use the Internet. It has been commercially driven companies forging new ideas and technologies to get more people contributing to and utilising services through it.
November 20th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Yahoo! are now losing their long standing CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang to add the turmoil besetting this company in recent weeks.
Who knows what is on the horizon now…..?
January 19th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Great blog Matt!
The only hope for advertisers is that Carol Bartz, the new Yahoo CEO, considers paid search to still be a priority for the company. The early rumours indicate this to be the case, but only time will tell.
With any luck, she’ll reverse a lot of the ‘improvements’ to the Yahoo platform we’ve seen over the last couple of years that seemed designed only to penalise their advertisers, thus driving them further and further into the hands of their competitors.
It’s going to be an interesting year, both for Yahoo’s employees, and for those who work with them on a daily basis.