Yahoo and Microsoft Get Hitched
Congratulations to the newlyweds… after a long, long courtship Microsoft and Yahoo finally managed to get together (the prenuptials are still being sorted out!). I have been in favor of this union for sometime now. Google owns a ridiculous share of the pay per click advertising market and desperately needs a competitor. Microsoft + Yahoo = Competition. As I have said for the last several years, the lens we look through at Click Forensics is that of the advertiser. Competition is always good for the advertiser.
The growth of online advertising, in particular pay per click advertising, has been meteoric. It is a great model and one that has proven hugely successful for hundreds of thousands of advertisers large and small. It is a model that will continue to grow as large advertisers shift more dollars from unmeasureable and less effective traditional media. It will grow because it uses context, targeting and relevancy to the highest level. Yahoo’s audience enhanced by Microsoft’s technology will mean innovation and efficiency. There is no doubt; Google will continue to have success. But the new partnership will make the online world even more attractive for advertisers.
Today there are standards in place to help hold the search providers accountable. There are better reporting, campaign management and keyword tools to add to the efficiency. I see a world in the near future where display advertising will begin to make significant gains from the data that exists in search. Context, targeting and relevance can improve every medium and this partnership will leverage that data to a much higher level than before.
So congrats to you both for a new start. The entire advertising community is pulling for you and expecting big things. I do need to warn you… expectations are high and the honeymoon is short.
Tags: click forensics, Google, Microsoft, Pay per click, Tom Cuthbert, Yahoo
August 18th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
I think the bond is fantastic because now that they are together that just leaves Google Adwords and Bing/Yahoo to worry about not all three. It is really going to free up some time. It is a big deal for Bing and i believe that Microsoft is serious about taking on Google they are really the only competition that Google has left now with this the search engine market has been narrowed down to two. It will be interesting to see what will come from this competition.
I hope that the two remain so that we can see continued competition which means more resources used to making their search engines better.