Posts tagged Yahoo
Did Yahoo shape the internet?
Mar 3rd
Yahoo! is celebrating its 15th birthday this week and it seems to be prompting a lot of talk about the internet, how it all got started and where it’s going. Did Yahoo start the internet?
Technology has fundamentally changed the way that marketers approach advertising. With the internet creating a new medium – digital – the marketing industry has changed forever, to which Yahoo was at the forefront.
Fifteen years ago, when Jerry Yang and David Filo had a lot of spare time on their hands, they decided that this internet thing was going to be a big deal and wanted to make it easier for people to navigate around.
When I think back to 15 years ago, I remember wondering what I’d ever need to know about the internet for. It was complicated and all scientific back then. Plus, the ‘www’ in my eyes stood for the ‘world wide wait’, I was impatient and would rather look up an encyclopedia than sit in front of an old IBM monitor listening to that terrible dial-up sound. My how things have changed.
Now there are 234 million websites, 200 billion spam emails per day, 126 million blogs and 27.3 million tweets per day. Yahoo alone has 600 million users, so I think a Happy Birthday is in order as just 15 years ago, there were only 18,000 web sites and fewer than 10 million people globally on the internet.
There are estimated to be 1.6 billion people on the internet today—about 25% of the world’s population.
In a blog posting, Yang and Filo wrote: “We’ve had the unique opportunity to help create an industry and shape the online world…always trying to invent the future. Of course, we didn’t set out to start one of the world’s largest internet companies or be leading a movement that has changed the world.”
It is worth remembering that Yahoo was the first major search engine to enjoy success in the early days of the internet – it was around before Google, yet we never said ‘I Yahooed it’. It was also one of the only internet companies to survive the dot.com bust, which consequently sent its shares soaring.
But by the very nature of the internet, the online world evolved which meant competition and when you come in at the top, there is only one place to go.
The huge lesson Yahoo has learnt in 15 years? Yang and Filo say: “Change and growth on the internet happen at warp speed—especially if you’re filling a need. With the proliferation of websites and with hundreds of thousands of people accessing our guide, it was simply impossible for us to continue doing this on our own.”
Yes, the lesson was to accept competition, and a few years later, defeat. But never fear, Yahoo will be around for a while yet. It has teamed up with Microsoft to make sure of that and had made headlines this week after signing a deal with Twitter.
Yang and Filo conclude: “The internet still has enormous and untapped potential. There are billions of more people we need to drive online, and then provide them with relevant content and opportunities that they’ve never dreamed about before.”
Digital Britain minister Stephen Timms agrees and has set the government a target of getting 7.5 million more people online by 2014 with up to £12m allocated to spend on digital social inclusion.
More info on how the internet has changed our lives from an interview with Yahoo.
Microsoft vs Google in a case of the pot calling the kettle black
Mar 1st
Microsoft would obviously be among the first to say that leading firms should not be punished for their success, according to vice president and deputy general counsel of Microsoft Dave Heiner. So why is Microsoft verbally bashing Google out there in the media over antitrust and competition concerns?
It is a case of the pot calling the kettle black – and I will now share a Simpson episode to tell you why.
In season nine of the Simpsons (screened in 1998), an episode called ‘Das Bas’ saw Homer attracts the attention of Bill Gates when he starts his own internet company – Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net.
Here is some of the script that should illustrate Microsoft’s blatantly childish jealousy issues and the way the company is currently doing business:
GATES: Your internet ad was brought to my attention, but I can’t figure out what, if anything, CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet does, so rather than risk competing with you, I’ve decided simply to buy you out.
HOMER: I reluctantly accept your proposal!
GATES: Well everyone always does. Buy ‘em out, boys!
(Bill Gates companions begin to trash the “office”.)
HOMER: Hey, what the hell’s going on!
GATES: Oh, I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of checks!
Gates isn’t buying Homer’s company, he’s ‘trashing’ it – much the way, one could argue, that he is verbally trashing Google currently in the press.
Government competition agencies are increasingly focused on Google’s growing power in search and online advertising, according to Microsoft.
But don’t forget, government competition agencies have spent the past seven months investigating a deal between Yahoo and Microsoft that is thought to be ‘antitrust’ and ‘anticompetitive’ too.
Google is dominant in certain markets, including search advertising. Last year the DOJ told a federal court that Google’s book search plan is anticompetitive in several respects. (One big problem is that Google would help itself to essentially exclusive rights to tens of millions of books—effectively locking out everyone else.)
Last week, the European Commission said it was investigating various aspects of Google’s conduct, including claims of retaliation, exclusivity and manipulation of search results to disadvantage rivals. Google was reported by Ciao, a subsidiary of Microsoft.
On Microsoft’s blog today, it said, “Google’s public response to this growing regulatory concern has been to point elsewhere—at Microsoft.”
It says that Google is telling reporters that antitrust concerns about search are not real because some of the complaints come from one of its last remaining search competitors.
It’s worth asking whether Google’s response really addresses the concerns that have been raised. I’ve asked Google and I waiting to hear back…but will the search giant even dignify such allegations and join this childish fight?
When the Yahoo and Microsoft partnership was approved last month, many were singing the praises of the pair. Others, myself included, said that while it is good for competition, the pair have quite the task ahead of them if they are going to get consumers and advertisers to migrate away from Google (a brand they have stuck by for over ten years). How will they do it? I pondered.
Bashing, it seems. But Microsoft maintains that it is not alone in trying this business tactic:
Heiner says: “Complaints in competition law cases usually come from competitors. (I’ve seen plenty of competitor complaints. Novell, when current Google CEO Eric Schmidt was at the helm, was never hesitant about complaining to regulators about Microsoft. Google hasn’t been shy about raising antitrust concerns about Microsoft in the last few years, either.)
“This is the way that competition law agencies function: They look to competitors in the first instance to understand how particular markets operate, the practices of dominant firms and the competitive significance of those practices.
“Of course, as we have always said, it is vitally important that competition law authorities also listen to and assess the views of customers, business partners and everyone else affected by a dominant player’s business practices. Ultimately what’s important is not who is complaining, but whether or not the challenged practices are anticompetitive.”
Is Google anticompetitive? Or just too big to touch?
Publishers, advertisers, advertising agencies and others want to see real competition in search and online advertising, says Microsoft.
But if that is provided, what guarantees that people will switch?
Can Microsoft and Yahoo knock Google off its throne?
Feb 19th
Steve Ballmer has described the approved partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo as a “milestone”, while Carol Bartz claims it to be a “breakthrough”. But why is this ‘alliance’ so significant?
The decision has been resting on the shoulders of the US Department of Justice and the European Commission for the past seven months. Japan, Korea and Taiwan are still yet to approve what will surely be a threat to Google’s ten year reign over the search market.
Google, which has a 85.78% share of the global search market, has sat on its throne quite comfortably this past decade as every competitor that has entered the market has still failed to even make a dent in Google’s audience. However, with a combined market share of almost 10%, Yahoo and Bing are proving serious in their bid for leadership of the search world.
Both CEO’s Bartz and Ballmer suggest the ‘alliance’ is a bid to boost innovation. More simply, it’s about creating more competition and boosting revenues.
The global search market is estimated to be worth around $33 billion. In the US alone it is said to be $4 billion and in the UK, marketers spent £1.75 billion in 2009 alone.
Yahoo is hoping to see some of that spend on its bottom line next year – it will be taking 88% of all search revenue generated from its partnership with Microsoft.
The question on everyone lips now is just how long will it take the pair to increase their share.
The deal will not be implemented straight away. In fact, it will take almost until the end of this year to know whether or not the alliance has been a success.
One thing we can be sure of though, is that it will certainly force Google to rethink its strategy (namely its Adwords platform which has in the past gathered criticism) and also keep it on its toes to innovate and offer bespoke offerings (not like Buzz!).
Poor Google. If you come in at the top there is only one place to go.
But Warren Cowan, CEO of Greenlight, writing for UTalkMarketing.com, is not convinced that Google’s grip on the search market will be strained.
He says that the idea that a Yahoo/Bing merger will create a search player with close to 30% market share (as quoted in AdAge) might be accurate for the US, but not in the UK – or western Europe for that matter.
Google is simply too big. But then again, isn’t what they said about all those banks that went bust (too big to fail)?
The big challenge now, however, is tempting away loyal Google users who have, for the past ten years, used little else when it comes to search.
Google is determined to make the web social, but will advertisers benefit?
Feb 10th
Google has launched yet another social feature to its brand – Google Buzz. The search giant is determined to make the web social, but how will it benefit its search business?
Many of the headlines around today announcing Google Buzz focus on ‘Google taking on Facebook’, even ours does on the UTalkMarketing homepage. And while the search engine might look to be competing with Facebook, it is in fact just taking a lead from the pioneering social media site.
As I explained last week on Facebook’s sixth birthday, Facebook isn’t so phenomenal and newsworthy just because it has more than 350 million global users; it is credited with creating what we now know popularly as social media.
It has also forced other digital media companies to change. Just a couple of years ago Google was the king of the internet which had a seemingly endless reign. Now it is being challenged in every corner including new competition from Microsoft and Yahoo! in the form of Bing.
Google said on its official blog: “We’ve recently launched innovations like real-time search and Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step with the introduction of a new product, Google Buzz.
“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience.”
That’s right, sharing is caring. And with this new feature Google is making sure that users share on Google – links from Google search, video’s from Google’s YouTube, photos from Google’s image search.
It’s locking its users down and making damn sure they stay on Google. An interesting way to beat off competition…and not just the competition from Facebook!
Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. It already has the potential to reach more than 150 million monthly users (its existing Gmail user base).
It’s all good news for Google’s search revenues as advertisers will be fighting even harder to get to the top of those search results if it means they may feature in someone’s inbox too!
Remember, Google is everywhere.
Yahoo! is coming back to life with display ads up 26%
Jan 27th
Yahoo!, the search engine that we all thought would pack it in just one year ago, has emerged from 2009 victorious with revenues up 10%. How did it come back from the brink?
Yahoo! has reported its fifth straight quarter of falling revenue, but the world’s third most popular search engine did see profits rise as the online advertising market began to show signs of life.
Revenue from display ads such as banners, which are core to Yahoo’s business, climbed 26% over the previous quarter. Online search ads, ticked up 4% – the first increase since the third quarter of 2008.
The results were far from Google’s 17% jump in revenue and a more than 400 percent surge in profits last week. However, Yahoo!’s income is up totaling £93 million, up from a £187 million loss in 2008.
Fourth-quarter revenue was £1 billion, down 4% from a year ago, but up 10% from the previous quarter.
Carol Bartz, the ambitious CEO of Yahoo who took the reins exactly one year ago implemented a wide-ranging company restructure, said that she was now confident about the state of the online ad business.
She said, “Overall, things seem to be returning to a more normal state in the online ad business. These results are not just the result of an improving economic climate. These are the direct result of hard work that culminated in Q4 and will continue into 2010.”
But Yahoo!’s problems predate the economic downturn and online advertising rut. The company has been bleeding traffic to Google and social networking sites such as Facebook and continues to do so.
In December, Yahoo held 17.3% of the search market in the US, down 0.2% from the previous month, according to comScore’s latest figures. Google and Microsoft’s Bing search tool both continue to gain share, controlling 65.7% and 10.7%, respectively.
Bartz has received praise in light of the latest earnings figures, with some observers hailing her $100 million branding campaign that launched last year a massive success. She has also been accredited with the successful deal to outsource Yahoo’s core search engine technology to Microsoft.
Bartz added, “The fourth quarter marked a strong finish to 2009, which was a transformative year for Yahoo!. Our business has positive momentum and we feel good as we head into 2010.”
Also over the past quarter, Yahoo! launched Ad Interest Manager, which aims to take transparency in online advertising to a new level by providing significantly greater control over users’ interactions with interest-based advertising to improve personal relevance and build trust.
Why web filters could be bad news for internet marketers
Jan 25th
We always hear of talk that web filters are hindering some businesses. SEO key words aren’t always so simple, or so innocent as one magazine in Canada has just found out.
The news that Google was to pull out of China over mounting frustrations over censorship laws last week shocked the search industry.
Just one week earlier, Yahoo and Bing had announced it was to succumb to internet censorship pleas from the Indian government, banning searches for terms such as ‘sex’.
Such searches would return this message: “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content. To learn more about SafeSearch requirements in your country or region, see How Bing delivers search results.”
While we may have been confused (because sometimes ‘sex’ is within context…for example ‘sex discrimination’) by the actions of the Chinese and Indian governments, now we can be a little worried about the impact these censorship rules given that the internet is more global than ever.
Canadian magazine ‘The Beaver’ has recently had to rename the almost 40 year-old title as it has been deemed as ‘vulgar’ in internet search terms.
An alternative meaning to ‘The Beaver’ is something crass that has no relation to the Canadian semi-aquatic rodent, actually.
And that alternative meaning causes web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine’s name.
Needless to say, has internet filters become more common place not just in certain countries and governments but also in the workplace, the past two years have posed a problem for the magazine.
A few years before Internet use became common, the magazine, which now has a circulation of about 44,000, sought its readers’ opinions and decided to stick with the name.
The last issue as The Beaver, which announces the name change to Canada’s History, was mailed to subscribers last week.
Filtering ISP’s is bad news for some businesses, and makes the marketer’s job a little tricky when it comes to key words and what classification their brands and websites might come under.
Some of possible repercussions of this censorship are:
1. This will result in significantly lower connection speeds (in the order of 80%).
2. As the filters will rely on a ‘black list’ provided by a government body, it opens the door to potential misuse or political interference.
3. Perhaps a veiled attempt to ‘Control the Conversation’ emanating from a growing and more vocal constituency via blogs and social media.
Do you think internet censorship will eventually affect you?
Is Baidu the real reason why Google wants to leave China?
Jan 13th
Google can never be number one in China, but it can stay number one in the West – where is needs to now focus its concentration given the rise of rival Microsoft.
Baidu is pretty much putting it to Google. The Beijing-based search engine dominates in China and has a market share of 77%. Google’s share is a mere 17%.
Is Google using the recent cyber attacks as an excuse to pull out of a market where it knows it can never be number one?
Baidu boasts more than 740 million web pages, 80 million images and 10 million multimedia files. By comparison, Google has more than one trillion web pages and billions of images. So what’s the cause of this disparity?
Google came to the Chinese market in 2006 (selling a stake it owned in Baidu tp pursue its own agenda). Baidu has been around since 2000. That’s a lot of time to get a head start, especially when Google is continuing to struggle with the Chinese government regulations.
The search engine king stated in 2008 that it was aiming to expand in China as the economy was booming and many western brands looked to cash in. But over the past year, its efforts have been hindered by censorship and Chinese loyalty as well as the effects of the worldwide financial crisis.
Its ambitions in China, though, go beyond the traditional online advertising and search – the company is still believed to be looking for multiple ways to introduce its Android platform in the region, despite the fact that Baidu has teamed up with China Mobile in a bid to also capture the mobile internet market.
How Google fares in China now will tell us a lot about what the company is made of since it is one of the few places where it will need to fight from behind rather than defend from the top. But has it lost its drive and patience for the Chinese market?
These recent cyber attacks certainly aren’t the first the search engine has encountered. Google’s Gmail went down for several hours last year in three separate major service disruptions.
The outages prompted commentators to suggest that users may soon switch to Microsoft’s new Bing.
And therein lies my point, Google has bigger problems than competing with Baidu in China. Its main focus at the moment is protecting its market share in the west and its leading position over both Yahoo and Microsoft.
It has already spent the last six months bolstering its advertising efforts, launching its first global advertising campaign, and ensuring new revenues by entering the mobile phone and consumer markets. It has also investing heavily in improving its search business for advertisers.
China is simply not the search giant’s highest priority at this point – a time of heavy competition in search. And it wouldn’t be unreasonable to hypothesize that Google is using the recent hackings in China as a cover to get out of a market where it knows it can never dominate.
Mobile apps could threaten Google, Yahoo and Bing’s search future
Jan 7th
As the internet goes mobile, apps could be replacing the need for search
Applications that take users directly to e-commerce sites and other web service destinations threaten search providers such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing, according to BroadPoint AmTech.
Some retailers including Amazon and eBay are making it even easier for consumers to visit their site and make purchases by offering mobile apps that enable full browsing and purchasing functionality.
Consumers who download these mobile apps directly to their iPhones and other smartphones and can then go straight to the source website and buy what they need. So will the search box be a redundant feature of the internet in the future?
There are several opportunities to make money from pairing ads with search engines on smartphones and other mobile computing gadgets, but applications that take users directly to e-commerce sites and other web service destinations threaten search providers, says BroadPoint AmTech.
Mobile web search and queries are on the rise and will continue to soar once consumers begin to leverage more location-based mobile services. It’s no wonder Google swore its allegiance for the space by bidding $750 million for mobile ad maker AdMob.
BroadPoint AmTech said 10 to 30% of the mobile searches consumers trigger for Amazon.com, eBay and the like go through the Google, Yahoo or Bing search box on their iPhones, Google Android devices and other smartphones. Ads served with these navigational queries cultivate decent click-through rates.
But many vendors are making it even easier for consumers to visit their sites and make purchases and it isn’t just the big companies that are creating mobile apps to drive e-commerce to their websites.
This presents Google, Yahoo, Bing and other mobile search engine providers with an interesting quandary, or intriguing options, depending on how they choose to approach this new turf war.
These providers can secure search toolbar distribution deals with phone makers such as Apple and wireless carriers, grabbing the scraps from the tables of mobile app providers.
Or these internet companies can build their own mobile apps for prominent placement on smartphone decks. For example, Google has recently released two powerful apps, the Google Maps Navigation turn-by-turn GPS program and the Google Goggles visual search app.
Both are currently available only on Android. Google hasn’t discussed how it might make money from these free apps, but serving local ads with its GPS app and its visual search app seems to be such an intuitive task that it would be surprising if Google did not undertake it.
In any case, Google is headed in the right direction with the impending Nexus One smartphone, a fast-performing HTC device. The search giant seems to be focused on making sure it can guide the development of the mobile web while protecting and expanding its own business model.
Could other search companies follow suit to protect their online futures?
Google is greedy, but we’ll borrow your ad tactics
Dec 7th
A new environmentally friendly search engine has attacked Google for being greedy with its profits. But it has no qualms about borrowing the search king’s ad tactics.
A new search engine is launching today, but it’s not going to be taking on Bing and it won’t be going anywhere near Google. In fact, it’s only aiming for 1% market share. Why? It has bigger issues to tackle.
Ecosia, created by ‘green-minded friends’ in Berlin, is aiming to be the world’s greenest search engine and has picked its launch date to coincide with the climate change talks which begin in Copenhagen today.
The search engine hopes to help save the Brazilian rainforests and says it will give at least 80% of its revenue to the World Wildlife Fund to protect rainforests.
If you’re wondering why the search engine interface looks very similar to that of Bing’s it’s because Yahoo and Bing, rather than competing with the new comer, are actually powering the sites search technology.
Also on the homepage of Ecosia is an update of how much of the rainforests we are saving by using the site. Here’s what it says today: “Each free web search saves about 2.4 yd² of rainforest. We have already protected 330,818 yd²”.
This all sounds very lovely, but what does it mean for marketers?
Unlike Google and other search engines, Ecosia promises to dump all records of users’ activities after 48 hours and not mine the data for marketing purposes. The new site has actually lashed out at Google for only worrying about making its investors happy and rich and not caring about the CO2 emissions each search creates (the same amount as a light bulb does in an hour, apparently).
But Ecosia is banking on the same online advertising tactics that catapulted Google into fame and fortune with the funds benefiting nature instead of investors.
Advertisers typically pay the search engine for each click on sponsored links appearing on results pages.
With sponsored links, search engines earn billions every year, but Ecosia founder Christian Kroll will be using such profits to fight global warming.
Ecosia was following through on its green theme by relying on data centres that run on electricity from alternative sources that do not emit heat-trapping gases.
The site already has more than 20,000 users. Here’s a cute little video of how it all works:
Bing appears to be winning the search engine battle, why?
Dec 1st
Is Google’s 13 years of dominance about to come to an end as we switch to the cool new Bing?
It may have only been launched in June this year, but already Microsoft’s “decision engine” Bing has already increased its usage by 7%. Google however, has seen the number of searches conducted slip by 1% - could this signal the beginning of the end of Google monopoly?
According to new research from Hitwise, Google accounted for 70.6% of all US searches in October.
Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.14%, 9.57% and 2.62%, respectively.
The launch of Google’s first global advertising push, which will include the UK, France, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, came as a surprise considering the search engine king built its entire empire without a single advert, relying only on word-of-mouth.
Google is feeling the heat from rising competitors for the first time with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing sparing nothing in their assault on its market share.
Microsoft is next year launching its first true web version of Office that will complement its traditional Office apps. Google, with its global campaign, is attempting to steal a march on the competition before it even launches, which is smart. But will businesses ever see Google as a serious competitor and software solutions provider looking beyond its search engine capabilities?
Microsoft isn’t doing this all alone, remember. It partnered up with ailing search engine Yahoo just a few months back and although the deal is currently awaiting approval over competition concerns from the US Justice Department, it already has the backing of advertising heavyweights including WPP, Publicis Groupe and Omnicom.
Google has also been slow to make as big as an impact as it was hoping for with its browser Google Chrome. It holds just a 2.59 per cent share, well behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which has 67.7 per cent of the market share.
While this may be the first global campaign from Google, it certainly can’t be the last.
Google has not only lost its stranglehold in western nations, but also in emerging markets such as China. In fact, China’s Baidu now holds the title of ‘the world’s largest search engine’ (given China’s 1.3 billion strong population) despite Google’s presence there. Google’s struggle to crack China is just one of the giant’s many anxieties over the past few years.
Google has always maintained that it isn’t worried about competition, but perhaps this is starting to change. Tell us what you think below.
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