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Y.M.C.A.
By Cameron Ferroni | February 5, 2008
Or maybe it should have been CMAY - Can Microsoft Acquire Yahoo? Obviously the big news this week is around the Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo. It’s hard to really read about anything else right now. So why am I writing about it? Well, I personally think it’s particularly interesting from a local perspective, both in terms of advertisers as well as technology.
As I have said before, the current landscape is complicated for a small advertiser. Choice 1 - advertise on Google. That’s easy. Doesn’t matter how big or how small, if you aren’t doing that, well, you’re missing out. But then what. Yahoo is a natural second choice given their size, but maybe you’ve heard about MSN, and maybe you think that you might be able to get more unique distribution through them, or maybe you just have more brand recognition for Microsoft, but maybe all of your competitors are on Yahoo, so you want to cover your bases there. At this point one of 3 things happens - 2 of which are bad for the industry - 1. You choose neither because they just aren’t big enough to warrant the hassle. 2. You decide to take the plunge, but you only take on one more partner so you don’t tax your advertising staff. 3. You do both, but you only have so much time in the day to manage these things, and they don’t really give you what you want. Now imagine a world where Yahoo and Microsoft were to merge. Assuming they do the right thing and combine their ad platforms (at least from a UI perspective) so that advertisers only have to manage one account, and suddenly they get all of the great traffic from Yahoo Local, and from Microsoft Live Maps, and from Search etc etc etc - suddenly you are getting a ton of great traffic with very little added work. This is good for everyone - Yahoo, Microsoft, Advertisers, Publishers - the works.
Now let’s take a look at it from a technology standpoint. The arguments are similar, but perhaps even more striking. Whether you are an SEM company, an aggregator, or a bid management developer, you are faced with similar choices - which platforms to support. However, your choices are multiplied, because you have to work with all three companies from a business perspective, a user perspective, and a technological perspective. And then you realize, you really don’t have a choice. To really provide a complete solution to your customers, you really should provide access to all 3 platforms, it just makes sense. And once you go down that path, it’s everything you can do to keep up with the platforms. Imagine, every single one of these companies has hundreds of engineers working to add great new features to their platforms to make ad serving stronger, better, faster. And there you are with your small bid management startup trying to keep up with all of the changes in the APIs, and adding all of the same new features to your product to try to keep up with technological and customer demand.
At the end of the day the trifurcation is a great opportunity, and it’s why there are so many businesses built around making it easier to work with the three big guys, but I feel pretty comfortable in saying that there will still be plenty of opportunity even if there were only two. There will be more $$ to go around for everyone in the industry, and the consolidation of choice would go a long way for advertisers and businesses alike….
Topics: Local SEO, Forecasts, Local Advertisers, Local Search, Content, Advertising, Uncategorized |