Despite seemingly high hopes among both Yahoo! and Microsoft shareholders, Microhoo is off again. The drama certainly continues, however. Yesterday after the market closed, Yahoo dropped this controversial puppy announcing its intention to allow the display of ads from Google's network on its own Web properties alongside its own network's ads and search results.
Among the notable elements of the agreement:
- From the user experience perspective the exact placement of Google's ads i.e. how the real estate will be divided up between the sources, remains as yet unclear.
- The deal is non-exclusive. Yahoo can strike similar deals with other companies, potentially.
- If Yahoo backs out anytime within the next 2 years, they'll have to pay a compensatory fee to Google.
- The deal doesn't eliminate the possibility of merger/acquisition talks between Yahoo and Microsoft resuming at some point.
If it does go down this arrangement will however, put a seemingly bitter and probably lasting top-off on the failed negotiations between them and Microsoft:
The WSJ (which happens to be mentioned in one of the randomly displayed "Fun Facts" atop Yahoo's press release, BTW) covers other details of the deal here.
We'll see how this affects marketers like myself who tend to be PPC customers of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft simultaneously at any given time. My initial expectation is there won't be a lot of impact on the day-to-day levels. Individually, paid search advertisers will continue to use their decided bidding strategies (e.g. CPC, ROI or CPA), additionally allocating budgets in accordance with where they see the best conversion rates, while maintaining coverage across all three major networks along with any secondary and tertiary CPC/CPM networks they might work through.
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P.S. - Happy Friday the 13th.
