Hell has frozen over. Microsoft and Yahoo! have struck a search deal.
Do you Binghoo!?
It’s a 10-year agreement in which Bing will power Yahoo! Search. This is a very interesting deal because it would give Binghoo! a combined 28.4% search market share according to comScore. Note: Google remains consistent at 65% share.
Details of the deal include:
- Microsoft will have the ability to leverage Yahoo! search technologies into it’s search engine algorithms.
- Yahoo! will sell the search advertising for the combined entities.
- AdCenter (Bing’s advertiser interface) will be the self-service ad platform.
- Microsoft will pay Yahoo! 88% of search ad revenue generated by Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! is anticipating nearly $275 million in revenue as a result.
- Display advertising (banners, video ads, etc.) is not part of the deal.
What's This Mean for Pharma?
Historically in our experience with pharma pay-per-click (PPC), MSN’s cost-per-click (CPC) and click-through rates have been noticeably better than Yahoo’s, with a few exceptions. Primarily because of the fact that Yahoo! has more advertisers. And, Yahoo! (logically) has more advertisers because of their larger search share.
Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief - Search Engine Land and a famous SEM guru) is currently conducting a survey on Twitter. Per a Tweet at 9:30 CT today - 2/3 of his respondents say the deal will hurt Yahoo! in the long-run. So, it will be interesting to see how things shake out over the next few months.
2 comments:
A few quick updates Wendy:
SearchEngineLand.com has a good comparison of the 2008 and 2009 deals side by side. Microsoft appears to have gotten a much better deal!
Also, Danny Sullivan posted a Tweet at 12:24 - talking to Microsoft and Yahoo. The deal covers web, image and video search. Seems like maps can be used - but on a non-exclusive basis. Danny is Tweeting about lots of other updates as well. Go check it out if you want: http://bit.ly/LxnDK
Thanks for keeping us updated, Chris!
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