What Can Yahoo Do To Compete with Google?
ryanjensen writes "Jay Currie over at Tech Central Station has an article up about Yahoo's pending entrance into the AdSense advertising market, and outlines some things Yahoo (and MSN for that matter) can do to compete, including: Paypal payouts, revenue share transparency, rewarding quality (but small) publishers, and offering an alternative to "keyword bids" for advertisers." It should be noted that Yahoo has already been fighting Google on this front - Overture, owned by Yahoo!, has been running an Ad-Sense like program for a while.
Yahoo! automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, Yahoo! cookie information, and the page you request.
This is a standard Apache feature. Virtually every website logs all requests - Yahoo is normal here, not the exception.
Clean search site? Done.
Yahoo spent $339 on research vs. Google's $139 (where it all went is a mystery though)
Yahoo has 5,500 employees vs. Google's 1,907
Each user spent 4.8 hours on Yahoo per month vs. Google's 0.6
Yahoo gets 119 million unique visitors per month vs. Google's 72 million.
(Data represents four quarters ending Sept. 2004).
Although Yahoo may not be as geek friendly (and therefore Slashdot friendly I guess) as Google, it has a lot of customers and is the starting point for a large part of the web-surfing population.
To me, this seems like very good leverage to squeeze into Google's main revenue source, targeded ads.
Treo + Kaffi = Traffi