Posts tagged Yahoo
Binghoo and the future for Google as the competition heats up
Jul 15th
It’s now a year since Yahoo! and Microsoft agreed a deal that will see Yahoo! drop its own search technology and deliver results from Microsoft’s Bing instead. As soon as September we could see Bing results taking over in Yahoo!’s portal, but what will the change mean for the search market?
In much of the world Google is the dominant player, and all the others are losers. In the UK, and in most of Europe, almost 90% of all searches go through Google, according to Hitwise. The search giant’s massive advertising revenue means it can respond swiftly to almost any competitive threat in these areas.
In the US, Microsoft and Yahoo! will hold a combined 25% of the search market. By combining forces in their home territory they may be able to claw back market share and give Google a run for its money.
In the fast-growing mobile market, Google’s Android operating system is gaining ground on Apple, whereas Microsoft remains a niche player. Mobile search holds little hope for a Microsoft / Yahoo! renaissance, but Google faces a tough fight to attain any kind of dominance there.
Facebook, the fast-growing social networking site, has been touted as a potential successor to Google. The two perform very different functions, but both rely on advertising for their revenue, and both follow a similar pay-per-click model. Facebook is no competitor in search – yet. But it’s already eating into Google’s advertising revenue.
In short, Google’s share of the search market looks pretty impregnable in the short term, and it will remain the main target for marketers. In the longer term, it will have to be careful that fighting a war on multiple fronts does not deplete its resources and produce losses on all of them.
Bruce Townsend of ecommerce software specialist, Actinic.
Let the web TV battle begin – Google’s and Intel’s assault on Apple and Yahoo!
May 17th
Google and Intel are expected to launch their ‘Smart TV’ platform this week, revealing a deal with Sony that will bring web services to TV sets. Has web TV finally arrived?
The launch will happen at Google’s highly anticipated annual developer conference in San Francisco, but it’s not secret.
Google tied up with Intel, Sony and Logitech back in March for a project which was called Google TV. Under this, all the involved companies sought to create a technology to make navigation of web applications easy through TV. And Intel and Sony are along for the ride in an attempt to find new markets.
And a year from now, according to Intel, TV will have been reinvented by the concept of Smart TV.
The venture includes Intel’s Atom microprocessor and Google’s Android operating system in set-top boxes and TVs featuring integrated internet services that could also allow broadcasters to turn set-top boxes into video game consoles.
The venture will allow the search engine giant to control internet access on yet another category of devices, ensuring it keeps its dominance in the global internet market. By offering its Chrome web browser on the Android system, Google will also be able to ensure its search and advertising technologies continue to bring in more profits.
With TVs, Blu-ray players and set-top boxes adding internet connectivity to their features, a host of companies are tailoring and integrating web-based content for our living room TV’s – further blurring the line between home entertainment and computing.
The question is, who will do it best? Read the rest of this entry »
Google makes its first acquisition in the UK
Apr 12th
Google has made its first acquisition in the UK, and it’s not the kind of heavy -hitter you might expect the giant to snap up.
Visual search company, Plink, is just a two-man start-up, based out of Oxford. It’s founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin are now both joining Google to work on Google Goggles.
Publically launched just four months ago, the site shot past 50,000 users in just four short weeks.
The company’s first product, PlinkArt, enables users to identify paintings and artworks with just a snap from their phone’s camera. Once recognised, users can read information on the artwork and artist, share their favourite pieces with friends, or even order a print to hang on their wall.
“We started Plink to bring the power of visual search to everyone, and we’re delighted to be taking a big step towards that goal today,” said Cummins and Philbin in a posting on Plink’s company blog.
“Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up.” Read the rest of this entry »
Digital TV everywhere. Google, Apple and Yahoo will slug it out
Mar 29th
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google TV, Apple TV and Yahoo! TV. While there are many out there touting its arrival, consumers are already watching TV through their computers, the future is upon us.
Some years ago, I remember seeing a story on 60 Minutes about the future of TV. Living in Australia at the time, in an outback wayward town where we only had four TV channels, seeing this story and Liz Hayes explaining that we’d soon have over 200 channels available to us, through HD (whatever that meant) seemed somewhat futuristic.
Yet, all those ‘beyond 2000’ predictions seemed to have integrated themselves perfectly, and somewhat under the radar.
Back then, I though 200-odd channels were exciting. I wanted to watch CNN and all those American reality shows…like the one with the people stranded on an island. Now days, the reality is much better.
Being the proud owner of a new 27-inch iMac - the screen which adorns my lounge room TV unit - I now watch TV digital through my computer screen.
Alway being connected is no longer a luxury, it’s a normalcy. No wonder the internet giants are looking to cash in.
Google has tied up with Intel, Sony and Logitech for a project which is currently called Google TV. Under this, all the involved companies want to create a technology to make navigation of web applications easy through TV.
It’ll be competing with Yahoo!, which has already launched a ‘Widget Engine’ for TV sets at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year that will allow consumers around the globe to connect to the internet via their TVs.
The search company will begin shipping the widgets by the end of Q1 2010.
The race is on.
Google 99.9% sure it will shut China site: good news for Yahoo and Bing?
Mar 15th
Talks with China over censorship have got Google nowhere fast and the search engine giant is now “99.9%” certain to shut its Chinese search engine, according to weekend reports. But what will its China exit mean for other search brands and furthermore, search advertising?
If there were a set of traffic lights blocking Google competitors wishing to expand in China with a red light, it’d now turn green – or at least yellow.
There are more than 380 million internet users in China and the search engine market is now estimated to be worth over $1.5 billion. And it’s still growing! At a phenomenal rate, actually. From 2006 to 2010, it is expected to see a compound annual growth in excess of 30%.
But the Chinese internet market is still relatively young, and as the rest of the nation starts to get online, the size of its search market is set to rocket. Is it really a good idea for Google to get out?
Google seems to be holding its search engine to ransom. It’s annoyed it can’t get what it wants, but what Google is perhaps failing to realise is, if it exits China, it will lose a massive slice of the potential search marketing pie and could open the road for Yahoo to overtake it in the usage stakes.
Yahoo and Microsoft are on the path of assault and Bing is already doing incredibly well. Imagine if it goes into China and cleans up, picking up where Google left off. There’s a whole search worked out there, censorship or not, there’ll now be a huge gap in the search market in China.
Even though Yahoo has been present in China for some time, it has never enjoyed the popularity it would like – but China remains somewhat of an untapped market in an economy that is crying out for reform and change.
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.
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