Yahoo and Microsoft Finally Sign Off on Search Marketing Deal

Late on Friday the deal that was announced with such hoopla between Microsoft and Yahoo back in July became ‘official’. Lest one think that this means that there is imminent change coming, please remember that the government has to OK everything as well. What this means for the search marketing world in 2010 is open for discussion, but one thing is for sure: change is on the way.

As recently as late October there were serious concerns that the complicated deal that was literally several years in the making was going to be delayed. Mountains of legal documents are a normal occurrence when big companies come together. This deal, however, was more complicated than most since these two giants in the online space are ‘coming together’ to form what is hoped to be a real competitor to the dominant position in search marketing held by Google.

So how does this impact the search marketing industry? Well, back in July when the press release version of the deal occurred Mashable broke down the impact as follows:

• Microsoft’s Bing will now be the search engine on all Yahoo sites.
• Yahoo will provide the relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business.
• Self-serve advertising for both companies will go through Microsoft’s AdCenter platform.
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo’s network.
• The term of the agreement is 10 years.

Now that the ink is just officially drying on this deal, the question is: when will the search marketers of the world see the impact? Well, there is the small issue of the deal being vetted by the government. It may be fair to assume that Google may have an interest in ‘making waves’ as to whether this kind of union is something that is good for business in general. Most agree that it is but if you were Google wouldn’t you have something to say?

Conventional wisdom says that by the end of 2010 Yahoo’s search engine will be Bing. Since the end of 2010 is an Internet year away let’s just wait and see.

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Comments

Posted by Frank Reed on Mon, Dec 07, 2009 @ 02:04 PM