Archive for the 'MSN' Category
If Microsofts walkaway from the Yahoo deal is indeed a ploy to save $5 billion, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may have proven himself pennywise and pound foolish. He was prepared to spend billions to finally make Microsoft a serious rival to Google. For a bit more, he may have destroyed Microsofts chance to get there.
Continue reading “Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsofts $5 Billion Mistake?” on Search Engine Land Now
Microsoft: Forget It On Paid Search Partnership, Google & Yahoo
Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo! We will assess closely all of our options. Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.
I cannot believe the press this morning, but it’s official Microsoft has made a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! All of us in the SEM industry have heard this ‘rumor’ before, now it’s for real!
The announcement of Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo! didn’t come as a total surprise, these two courtesans have danced around before. A merger of these two have been speculated over for the past 18 months, ever since the companies discussed collaborating in late 2006.
Make no mistake; this deal will close. The $31 per share offer represents a 62% premium over Yahoo!’s market close Thursday.
How can the Yahoo! Board say no? We can’t find many reasons (especially with T.Semel no longer pulling the purse strings). Either way, they should not combine the names; as you can see above neither is very appealing “Yah-soft” or “Micro-hoo” (both sound like childrens candy names to me)
See Latest News Coverage:
Microsoft, Yahoo! In Possible Partnership Talks
A Messy Marriage
Microsoft/Yahoo Merger to Take on Google?
5 reasons to worry about a Microsoft/Yahoo merger
Justice Department likely to review a Microsoft-Yahoo merger
UPDATE:
BlogNewsChannel posted an amazing writeup on the proposed merger see below:
* About 30% of the search engine marketplace. Microsoft has wanted a position to challenge Google for a long time, and this would give them a big enough search engine to hopefully make some noise. However, Microsoft would have to reverse Yahoo’s decline in order to take advantage of that market share.
* Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail. Yahoo claims 255 million email account, Microsoft 280 million. Reports put Gmail at around 51 million accounts. If properly leveraged, Microsoft’s 500 million-plus accounts could represent an insurmountable number one.
* Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. As of 2006, Microsoft had 61% market share worldwide, good for #1, and Yahoo had between 27% and 37%. Yahoo’s number were the same as AOL Instant Messengers (there is more than 100% because users often use more than one client). Google Talk is a non-factor practically abandoned project, and Microsoft one-two punch could bury this market for good.
* Advertising revenue. Microsoft pulled in $1.5 billion from its online services division in 2007, most of it in ad dollars, losing $510 million. Yahoo made $7 billion in 2007, turned a profit of $700 million, on $6.088 billion in advertising revenue. It isn’t quite Google’s $16 billion, but Yahoo is a profitable online advertising company, and gives Microsoft a strong, larger base to grow from. It will take seven year for Yahoo to make enough revenue to cover the acquisition cost.
Pay Per Click search engines include the most popular web sites on the internet such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others. By taking a look at top PPC sites, their audience, costs, and comparable benefits, users will be able to make a better decision when constructing a PPC advertising campaign.
Google AdWords is the most popular PPC choice, with the ability to serve ads directly related to keywords on the search engine results pages as well as through content related ads on Adsense web sites.
Yahoo! Search Marketing was one of the originators of PPC advertising, and remains a popular choice with advertisers online due to its broad user base.
Microsoft AdCenter also offers many of the same PPC advertising possibilities through its search engine and MSN network,
Ask.com is one of the biggest web sites on the internet for content and advertising on this network with PPC is a good choice for expanding campaigns.
Shopzilla is a product comparison web site that allows PPC ads to be placed in content locations.
Shopping.com is another product comparison web site with Pay Per Click advertising that is excellent for retailers.
When you start to put ads on one of these web sites, keyword analysis is another factor that is important in PPC advertising. Search engines sort and analyze data on the internet which include keyword analysis. Keywords are used in Pay Per Click advertising to place the ads on results pages with the same user queries. Advertisers can also select different combinations of terms that are also entered by web surfers when looking for information on the internet.
Some keywords are popular, and as PPC advertising is based on people bidding for keywords, the most popular keywords are expensive. Less popular PPC keywords are less expensive. So you can balance your campaigns by experimenting with different ad words, and chart the effectiveness of each campaign through analytics.
If you expand your PPC campaign to more than one search engine, you can also use the same ads and keywords or custom create a new campaign for each search engine. Even if your ad is not clicked on in the PPC campaign, your domain name and information will still be read by thousands of people on search engine results pages. This can assist in developing brand recognition for your web site in the marketplace using PPC advertising methods.
Seems like Microsoft either experiences some problems with its queries processing or plans to re-build its services structure. The latest news that alarmed the whole SEO community was the post in Live Search official blog that they have disabled the link:, linkdomain: and inurl functionalities in the search engine.
For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.
We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve.
Is 4.4% a big deal? Well, when it goes about search it is! According to Nielsen//NetRatings’ research 4.4 % is the drop in search volume Microsoft search engine has experienced for the last 2 years which basically equals to approximately 7 billion lost searches (about 300 million per month).
The share of MSN Search starting from February 2005 till February 2007 decreased from 14% to 9.6% while Google’s share rose from 46% up to 56% for the same time. The drop is party explained by the Search engine rebranding from MSN to Live Search, party by the stability of Google’s and Yahoo’s performance and Microsoft’s reluctance of searching for new markets and opportunities.
Some Internet advertisers might have already received the email notification from Microsoft AdCenter support team about the launch of the content advertising pilot program. Recently the upgrade was announced on AdCenter Blog also.
