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Yahoo Buys Overture for $1.63 Billion
securitas writes "Today Yahoo announced it plans to buy search technology company Overture for $1.63 Billion. The move is seen as a way to compete with rivals like Google and MSN, especally in the paid search and advertising category. This takeover occurs following this article about Google and Overture's race to secure partners for its paid search advertising. Other reoprts at CNN Money, ZDNet/CNet, AP via the Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones via Yahoo. Press release at Overture and Yahoo."
I've never heard of Overture and I'm sure a lot of other people haven't either. Do they actually make any search technology worth mentioning?
What does overture have that is worth $1.63 billion to Yahoo? Yahoo's already still pretty good. What are they hoping to get out of Overture?
Everyone used to use Yahoo. It was a verb, like many people use Google. "Do you Yahoo?" everyone said.
But now the big mama has had her throne taken by another, and is hotly pursuing the rival. Yahoo just recently bought up Inktomi (which will be very interesting to see what happens if they dump Google's web search and integrate Inktomi... which is probably bound to happen soon).. and now they just ate up Overture for PPC.
Yep. She's mad. But can she take back her place in the kingdom? I doubt it.
MSN I can see competiting with, but Google? The best part about Google is the complete lack of picture ads. A much better use of all that money would be to get rid of advertising, which is all over Yahoo.
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
Speaking off the top of my head, I seem to remember that Yahoo is an acronym: "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", or something like that. If this were actually important, I'd probably have remembered the source as well.
Aptal soru yoktur; sadece merakli aptallar vardir.
Yahoo seems to have lost the search war. And that doesn't seem to be a problem. Their search engine is their least compelling feature right now (well, second least compelling, right after the shopping section).
:P
Yahoo!Mail has, at least from what I can see, displaced Hotmail as the General Free E-Mail Provider Of Choice. (It absolutely amazes me Microsoft.) Now, i'm not a marketing research agency-- ll i have to work with is single data points, but I never hear anyone say "check my Hotmail" anymore. I hear "Check my Yahoo!Mail" a lot. And it seems to me that all 5,634 of my 11-year-old sister's friends use Yahoo Mail. They seem to act as some kind of borg-like unified swarm. And Yahoo!IM seems set to lose that war in the long run, but they aren't doing bad, for now. Certainly doing better than MSN messenger. And their news service is passable.
And all I know is, as long as Yahoo.com provides me a place where I can play scrabble on the internet, I'll keep coming back
Basically, they seem to be turning into the first non-shit instance of this mythical "portal" thingy everyone kept talking about during the dot-com bubble. For that, they need A search functionality, but they don't necessarily need perfect search.
(P.S. i don't know about you but i never heard ANYONE use 'yahoo' as a verb except in Yahoo.com advertising)
Can they beat Google? Hell no, never. Can they beat MSN? I'd bet money that they will.
How come the search engine on overture.com says,"Powered by Inktomi" which is a Yahoo! company ?
It really shouldn't come as any surprise, but it looks like the search companies are just trying to push for more visitors, rather than focusing on a better product. It's this very same concept that made Yahoo become what is, in my opinon, it's biggest problem: bloatware. Let's face it, Google is the closest we have to a website that's really focused on being a search engine anymore. Hopefully this won't change anytime soon.
http://mediagoblin.org/
So, it's all about search engines, now, is it?
Ok, but I'm still waiting on push technology, portals and b2whatever to revolutionize my web 'experience'(*).
I will admit that I don't have any idea whether this makes good business sense, but my gut reaction is that Yahoo! is overpaying. In fact, I expect that this will throw them in the same leaky washbasin with AOL Time Warner, not Google.
(*) Face it -- NONE of this is going to get any better until we stop using words like 'experience' and 'product' to describe this stuff. Marketing is the real evil!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
It doesn't pop-up, blink, animate, or pretend to be legitimate search results or articles.
While google does have paid links on the right, distinct from search results, they also will raise your rank for a fee. A former employer of mine swears by this -- she paid the couple-hundred-dollar fee (IIRC) and now she's the top link for searches in her industry. This has resulted in hundreds of new customer sign-ups, and has already paid for itself in a few month's time.
--
I'll tell you what I'm thinking, 1.6 Billion dollars, and they need the ad revenue from putting ads at the bottom of my yahoo e-mail account?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
How on earth is Yahoo!'s gonna compete with that? Seriously, I'd like to know
I'll tell you. When someone wants to search for something go ahead and use Google (it is the best search engine IMO).
However, when someone wants to get a free email account, have someone host a free webpage for thier hobby, talk to people with similar interests in groups, or IM eachother they will use Yahoo Email, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo-Geocities, or Yahoo Messenger.
Yahoo is more of a community based services provider, where as google is a great search engine. They cater to very different markets. I don't think Yahoo would really care if they were only the number 2 or even 5 best search engine as long as thier community stayed strong.
Ave Molech Setting
Yahoo is buying Overture to start sandbagging for the oncoming search engine wars. The browser war may have been lost years ago, but the search engine war is just heating up. The camps are aligning... Who are you going to side with?
Yahoo! did not buy a "search engine" they purchased a company that provides a Pay Per Click advertising mechanism that is most likely very profitable. I can say that they they get a pretty good chunk of my advertising budget every month.
These are examples from my business. Using the same basic keywords.
google: $2.85 average cost per click
overture: $.95 average cost per click
Which one of those makes more sense to you from a business perspective?
Answer: It depends on who you're talking about. Overture is a wonderful thing to hand to a PHB to make him feel good. It has everything that PHBs love. Gambling, bluffing, seemingly high stakes, and best of all, it counts as "work". I'll never forget the look on my boss' face when I was leaving the company and told him that he would have to (read: get to) control the Overture listings. At that time, Overture had recently gone to a flexible pricing structure, meaning that if you bid $1.00 for a keyword, and your nearest competitor bid 75 cents, and the next bid 50 cents, you would pay 76 cents (1 penny more than the next highest bid), your competitor would pay 51 cents, et al. I was able to devise (at least, that's what I told him I did, after vast amounts of "research"; in reality, I think most dummies could figure this out) a plan. Storm into keywords with bids of upwards of $1.50, where the next highest bid would be in the 20 cent range. The companies bidding 20 cents aren't going to jump you up to $1.51, and you end up only actually paying 21 cents, while scaring off any serious bids to overtake you. Then, and here's where the gamesmanship and paying attention come in, if someone pulls the same thing on you, you bid $1.49 to their $1.50. Now every click costs your competitor $1.50, and only costs you 21 cents, even though you're in second. Bleed them dry. But watch out that they don't drop to $1.48 and turn the tables. My PHB loved this crap. He would sit and click refresh on the bid page just to make sure that Hated Company X wasn't pulling a fast one. Kept him off my back the last week I was there, and I'm sure he's still at it.
All that said, I found Overture to be a gigantic money suck, apparently a good enough one that Yahoo! would like it for themselves. Any industry with decent penetration has enough competition that bidding will get ridiculously out of hand. And I had a pretty good idea that our paid-for-listings on the likes of Yahoo were just cannibalizing the clicks from our actual search listing on Yahoo, and costing us 50 cents a click. Overture may be pretty much idiot-proof, but there are any number of free and relatively easy ways to increase traffic, if you've just got a little time and energy to put into it. So, if Overture changes, or dies, or melds into Yahoo, the PHBs (and those who deal with them) may be disappointed, but those with the ability to do a little actual work shouldn't actually care.