It’s been a long time coming, but Yahoo! has now partnered with the two biggest players in search – Google and Bing. Yahoo! is sitting in the middle of what may prove to be a battle over who controls the search ads.
Back in February Yahoo! announced their new partnership with Google on contextual advertising.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we recently signed a global, non-exclusive agreement with Google to display ads on various Yahoo! properties and certain co-branded sites using Google’s AdSense for Content and Google’s AdMob services.
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It was a big move for both companies. It created a bridge of communication and partnership. That bridge may be exactly what Google needed to edge their way into Yahoo! search based ads too.
Currently all search ads on Yahoo! are provided by Bing. So when you buy PPC ads through Bing you automatically show up on Yahoo! You can read more about that here – It’s not news. What is news is that Google and Yahoo! may be discussing a similar arrangement that may push Bing out the door.
Google’s Senior Vice President Nikesh Arora was recently quoted as saying:
“Google could also possibly work with Yahoo on search-based advertising”
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This would clearly put Yahoo and Bing at odds over their 10 year search ad deal. Although that may be exactly what Yahoo! is attempting to do. They expressed disappointment with how Microsoft has handled the project in the past.
That deal has been largely disappointing since it was struck under the regime of ousted CEO Carol Bartz several years ago.
Many reasons are given for the poor performance of the entire arrangement, including lack of improvement of cost per click and share growth for both parties.
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For now all contextual ads on Yahoo! belong to Google. All search ads belong to Bing. But one has to wonder how long that will stay the same.
Well … Yahoo! can go anywhere they want. Who needs Yahoo! when you partner with Facebook?
Just for the record … Yahoo! cheats. Before Bing they used to show my content ads on kontera, and what I could get for apenny they were costing me a dime. After bing, they still cheat. You buy “search” ads and they show them on yahoo answers and voice, where only chitika ads are there!
The only way for Google to get their ads on Yahoo without their clients complaining every other second is to buy Yahoo.
We’re still ultimately in Google’s hands though.