Legal Research

Follow the money

I find this post at ReadWriteWeb interesting.

I always say "follow the money" whenever I see mergers and acquisitions proposed. It's the same with ad-based businesses. Whenever I watch the search business I look at the number of ads on the pages and search results and Google does very very well at that. They do a good job of dealing with their prime customer - advertisers. If you follow the money you know users basically don't deliver much except clicks and eyeballs. Ad buyers do deliver cash - the tune if billions in profits.

So, why would Microsoft want Yahoo!? According to this post, that looks into advertising impressions, we find out that search isn't the biggest opportunity for ads in the consumer space (which is where most of our library public, college, K-12 and academic users reside). It's all about e-mail again.

"Email is 49% of Impressions. Portals and Search Engines is 10% by contrast. This is some free data from Nielsen-Netratings.
56% is Microsoft and Yahoo combined market share of webmail. Gmail is down at 7%."

I'm astonished at the size of the comercial and ad opportunity and the threat to Google. Combined with a recession driven drop in ad buying and you can see another shift on the horizon among the big players.

Interesting.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on February 25, 2008 (boomark / email).