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Jennifer Walsh- Bayshore Solutions Senior Account Manager
By: Jennifer Walsh – Bayshore Solutions eMarketing Team
Yahoo! and Microsoft Alliance – What does this mean for me?!
In February, Yahoo! and Microsoft received U.S. and E.U. regulatory clearance for their search alliance merger. According to the latest numbers, Google held 65.5% of the search market share, Yahoo! dropped to 16.8% and Bing/Microsoft increased to 11.5% – Combined Yahoo! and Bing will still not even hold half of the market share that Google has! So what does this mean for the search industry and online marketing?
This is going to be a very big change for online marketers but not so much for users. Yahoo! has been in the search business for a long time, they have completed a lot of testing and know from a usability perspective what users want. On the other hand Microsoft had been very successful on the technical side and has developed a strong presence with computers and software. Yahoo! and Microsoft plan on utilizing Yahoo!’s experience in search and Microsoft’s technical experience to make their search platform very relevant and user-friendly.
For advertisers, this will mean you will be able to place advertisements on both networks from within one interface. For convenience reasons, this is great news since you will now be able to manage campaigns for both search engines from just one location. The downside to this is it could possibly create more competition, since it will be easier for advertisers to manage a pay-per-click campaign and could increase the costs per click.
Yahoo! and Microsoft are hoping to have things worked out before the 2010 holiday season but if they feel their new system is not going to be stable enough to take on the increased advertising during that time they are going to hold off until 2011 to launch the new program. Of course Yahoo! and Microsoft are promising that this merger will lead to more innovation and improved user experience on the search engines–but I guess now all we can do is wait to see what happens…
What do you think will happen with the merge of these two search engines?
Jennifer Walsh is a Senior Account Manager for Bayshore Solutions.
