Q*K 发帖数: 3464 | 1 This morning, Microsoft announced that its adCenter paid search platform is
now powering 100% of search advertisements on Yahoo search results in the
United States and Canada.
This is where the money starts to hit the road in the partnership the
companies announced last year, in which Yahoo basically turned its search
business over to Microsoft.
For Yahoo, outsourcing Yahoo Search results to Microsoft's Bing technology
was a cost-saver, as Yahoo no longer has to invest in the insanely expensive
task of keeping up with Google's breadth and relevance.
But the deal doesn't start to benefit Microsoft unless it drives up revenue
per search.
Here's why. Every time a user clicks an adCenter ad on Yahoo's search engine
, Yahoo keeps at least 88% of the money from that click. Microsoft gets no
more than 12%.
But the deal also eliminates Yahoo's paid search platform as a competitor.
Advertisers still have to buy search ads on Google because of its traffic--
it has more than 70% search market share in the U.S., and higher overseas.
But Yahoo Search and Bing now combine for most of the remainder. That makes
it much more worthwhile for advertisers to bid on keywords at adCenter.
More bids means higher prices for keywords, meaning that Microsoft earns
more revenue per search from the combined business than it was able to do
when it had only Bing with about 12% market share. (It's also going to raise
prices for advertisers.)
Powering Yahoo's search business also lets Microsoft collect far more data
about the search habits of users and--critically--the types of ads they'll
click on. This should help the company improve the relevance of the ads it
shows, which drives up click rates. Again, more revenue per search.
At Microsoft's Financial Analyst Meeting in July 2009, shortly after the
deal was announced, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer inadvertently displayed a
slide that showed the company's detailed financial expectations from the
partnership. (The slide was picked up and published by Brier Dudley of the
Seattle Times before Microsoft was able to eliminate it from the official
slide deck it published on its own Web site.)
According to that slide, Microsoft expects net revenue from the combined
search business to be about $700 million more per year than it was before
the merger. That net revenue will be split approximately 50/50 between
traffic acquisition costs paid to Yahoo, and "uplift" to Microsoft. That "
uplift" number only makes sense if revenue per search grows according to
expectations.
Of course, if Google keeps gaining market share, the whole deal will soon
become moot.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/10/27/businessinsider-today-microsoft-begins-to-make-money-from-the-yahoo-deal-2010-10.DTL#ixzz13gjODAte |
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