What The Microsoft-Yahoo Merger Means To Search Engine Marketing

Days after the news went out, the search engine marketing world is still buzzing from the Microsoft proposal to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. It does not matter that Yahoo! rejected the bid, for now at least. The search engine marketing world is still teeming with speculations on whether Microsoft will up its bid or do a hostile takeover, and what other choices seem palatable to the ailing dotcom pioneer.

More importantly, channels in the search engine marketing arena are full of discussions on what would be the possible impact on this proposed merger, said to be the biggest merger in the recent history of the industry since the Time Warner-AOL merger, on the way search engine marketing is done.

What exactly does the proposed merger between Microsoft and Yahoo! hold for the search engine marketing sector of the industry? Search engine marketing experts have listed at least three possible scenarios resulting from the possible venture. These three are as follows.

Better consumer choices. Everyone knows that the search engine marketing industry and all related fields is dominated by none other than Google. Its query share – that is, the percentage of searches done by Internet users – eats up 66% of all searches in the United States alone. The combined query share of Microsoft and Yahoo adds up to only 28% in comparison.

Granted that the numbers as they stand today would not be able to even shake the foundations upon which the throne of Google sits, but the combined forces of Microsoft and Yahoo can give it serious competition. Serious competition among giants always means better choices for consumers in the search engine marketing industry.

Possible price pegging. With the combined numbers and with the desire to provide a serious competition to Google, Microsoft may consider offering its pay-per-click advertising services at a much cheaper price than Google is currently charging. That is always good news to search engine marketing practitioners. With Yahoo!’s websites being the most visited websites in the world, marketers may see this move as better value for their advertising money.

Easier time for web analysts. With fewer players in the playing field, just Google and the combined Microsoft-Yahoo, it would be easier for analysts in the search engine marketing industry to analyse aggregate their information and to do their numbers crunching.

Yahoo! as a separate corporation will not end up a winner in whatever deal it enters, the way things stand right now. Perhaps we are seeing the end to the last of the dotcom bigwigs of the wild 1990s. But on the side of search engine marketing practitioners, a loss for Yahoo! in this proposed merger may be a big win. The creation of a more serious and more credible competition to Google, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described his company’s proposal to take over the online properties of Yahoo!, will always be seen as a good thing in the realm of search engine marketing.

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What The Microsoft-Yahoo Merger Means To Search Engine Marketing

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