What a Shame
Looks like Jerry Yang has nixed the idea of outsourcing search ads to Google in favor of trying to go it alone and creating a ‘marketing operating system’. God, you can just imagine the powerpoint slides with that phrase.
Loyal readers of this blog will remember that I am all for Yahoo syndicated Google Ads. But that it doesn’t need to be an all or nothing scenario.
Devote 15-20% of the impressions to the Google deal. Meticulously measure and obsess over how Google shows ads against keywords. This does two things:
1) You light a fire under the ass of Panama and show in cold, harsh light of day how much more Google generates for the exact same query. Every weekly meeting, the same report. If that can’t give focus, nothing can.
2) Now that you have done that, you have a huge data set between what Google chooses to show and what you choose to show and you can isolate simple differences like Advertiser X paying more for keyword Y on Ad words vs Panama and get into the secret sauce factors more quickly.
Sad to see that they thought of the Google ad syndication as an OR rather than an AND.
Niki,
Do you /really/ think Google would have done a deal on those terms? He who can see the data, wins. Google is the biggest b2c internet pure play out there because they figured that out first and executed on it fastest. I have a very hard time believing GOOG would be interested in anything less than 100% of Yahoo’s search marketing business, and if they got it I have an equally hard time believing Yahoo would see any data beyond their name and a number on a check each month. Further, my guess is that any rev-share to Yahoo of less than 75% wouldn’t make financial sense.
Most definitely. They would have given more than 90% revenue share. They did that for both AOL and ASK who are smaller than Yahoo and have less negotiating leverage.
The incremental cost for Google is next to nothing and they would have given many concessions, including the analytics and feed control. Yahoo are just sitting with all the cards.