Floundering In The Search Pool
The First Scribe team has been unhappy with Yahoo search for a few years. We feel their search technology is weak and ROI from Yahoo falls well behind other traffic sources.
Obviously, we were happy to watch as Microsoft made moves to acquire Yahoo in late 2007 and early 2008. Those efforts failed so now Microsoft appears to be standing by, waiting for Yahoo to drown before they swoop in for a last-minute, white-knight maneuver.
Venture capitalist Todd Dagres of Spark Capital likened this approach to that of a crocodile. "Rather than try to eat its prey while it's warm and tough, (Microsoft is) dragging it down to the bottom of the river, sticking it under a rock and eating it later when it's cold and soft," he said.
What does this all mean to us?
All we can do is speculate but we've heard a few rumors that could greatly change the picture if they bear fruit:
- Yahoo to hand over ad space to Google
- While this will probably equate to better PPC ROI, it will certainly harm Yahoo's already poor standing with advertisers.
- Yahoo to merge with AOL
- AOL is also facing difficult times. A merger between Yahoo and AOL could create a significant force.
- A healthy merger creates a new way to target demographics missed by Google.
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