Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for 44b

February 1st, 2008 by Chris

Read it up here.

Honestly, I don’t understand this move.

Yahoo sucks. Their search engine sucks, their advertising service sucks. Who here doesn’t think Microsoft Adcenter is better than Yahoo Search Marketing? I believe until just very recently YSM didn’t even allow you to opt out of their syndicated results, so to advertise on their search results you had to deal with a ton of spammy clickfraud like clicks.

Personally, MSN traffic converts better for me than any other search engine, I think their Adcenter program is well run, and I also think their search is better than Yahoo’s.

Granted, Yahoo has many other properties (Rightmedia, Flickr, etc), and Yahoo’s horrible performance over the past few years has hammered that stock and made it very cheap, but still, I feel MS had turned a corner as far as catching up goes and they could have had all of Yahoo’s market position without paying for it.

This is big for our industry of course. It would mean that those hoping MS would be able to offer an alternative to Adsense (in every way) will be disappointed since undoubtedly they’ll keep that comedy of errors that is YPN (read more about the joke that is YPN.)

Also, consider history. Yahoo gobbled up Overture, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista. Supposedly combining the best features of all of those sites (results to be determined), and now Microsoft wants to gobble up it all.

This will mean one less bit of diversity in our businesses, both in advertising and in SEO, and that I dislike. Additionally, what kind of pressure is this going to put on ASK.com? That will be interesting to see.

7 Responses to “Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for 44b”

  1. Kyle  Says:

    MSN is definitely the best converter…no argument there. I’m guessing this is due to Susy-computer-user buying her new Dell with Windows XP, defaulting to MSN.com, then searching on ‘coach handbags’.

    Live.com has been having quite a few problems lately with their search engine. And it is still plagued with spam and garbage many times over Yahoo or Google.

    Yahoo’s search engine is far ahead of Microsoft’s. You would think Microsoft could create a proper working engine, but maybe they would rather purchase the technology.

    I have been noticing symptoms of Live.com being broken at various times over the past 6 months… but here are some links if you don’t trust my judgement.

    http://www.google.com/base/a/2953513/D5617347428396364573
    http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070819-095338
    http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/016014.html

    I get the impression that Microsoft has the people and leadership to compete with Google (somewhat), but not the search technology.

    Then add in movies.yahoo, flickr, games.yahoo, and other popular services as a big bonus.

  2. JR  Says:

    So you’re saying Yahoo has got the market but their mill doesn’t work right… and MS knows how to fix it.
    That makes it a good deal than.

  3. Dan  Says:

    Don’t speak too soon…http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/36731/Yahoo!+looks+to+Google+to+fight+Microsoft+bid.html

  4. Colin  Says:

    I was surprised by this news too. It’ll be an interesting one.

  5. Dan  Says:

    Plenty on the wires this morning about Yahoo! trying to restart talks with AOL about a possible merger to stave off M$ “undervalued” offer.

  6. Dan Grossman  Says:

    You’re assuming the purchase is only about getting their search volume. It’s not. Yahoo!’s got more display advertising than anyone else, including entire networks under their wing. They’ve got huge non-search audience that’s just as monetizable as search queries. Considering Microsoft’s only really successful web property is MSN, they’d be expanding their interactive media division by a huge amount here.

  7. satish  Says:

    It is ideal for microsoft to go for the deal . Yahoo has a good customer base which MS could utilise . If they want to make the kill this is the time as yahoo is facing a downturn . Oppurtunities arise only from crises .

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