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It's Yahoo Plus eBay vs. Google
Octagon Most writes "Yahoo and eBay have announced a broad partnership in their efforts to compete against Google and Microsoft." From the article: "In addition, Yahoo Web search features will be integrated into a co-branded version of the eBay toolbar, and the companies said they would explore developing 'click-to-call' ad technologies on their respective Web sites. 'Click-to-call' provides a link inside an advertisement that allows consumers to directly call the advertiser to pursue a transaction."
What the hell are you talking about?
How they actually implement this. As in, I read more than the FP summary and discovered how it really works.
You click the link. It asks for your phone number. You enter your phone number. Someone calls you. As the basic premise, you don't need to go through a menu system to get to a human (admittedly good), and don't need to pay LD charges for the call (does anyone not have unlimited LD these days?).
Why would you not prefer to [...] call a business through skype with no number that be traced or ID'ed back to you
First, consider what percentage of people use VOIP, nevermind Skype specifically (yeah, like EBay would support Vonage for this?). Do you really think they plan to spend a good bit of PR-allocated money to target less than one percent of their market?
Second, if you consider VOIP even remotely "anonymous", I have a bridge to sell to you.
It doesn't beg anything. It raises the question.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html
RTFA. Yahoo is only getting exclusivity for ebay's graphic ads.
Ads with the label "aff" are not made by eBay themselves, but by their "affiliates" (ie. people who get a percentage for each sale).
WARNING!!!! Above is a good example of why you should never take stock tips from the internet! Lets just take a look at a couple of my favorite nuggets ;-)
;-)
Keep in mind that Google's fundamentals include a 65 price to earnings ratio, the improvement of which has exceeded their market cap's growth........Even more impressive, GOOG's earnings-per-share is almost five times that of MSFT's
OK, first about the P/E ratio. The above makes it sound like a high P/E ratio is a quality you should look for in attractive investments. DON'T DO THAT!!!!! The P/E ratio is basically how much you have to pay for $1 in earnings. Its price per share over earnings per share. So a high P/E means your paying more for each $1 in earnings. The next confusing part is about Goggle's earnings-per-share being almost 5x's what MS has. While that is true, it is completly meaningless by itself. To put it in perspective Google's earnings-per-share (eps) IS just over 4.5x MS's (eps). However, since Google's stock price is over 16x what MS's is you are paying over 16x the price to earn 4.5x more per share.
I am not here to make any recommendations on any stock, but the above is just complete non-sense. A stock with a high P/E ratio could be a great investment (as could a stock with a low P/E). The thing to remember a high P/E ratio generally relates to higher risk. The higher the the P/E ratio the higher expectations the market has for the stock. Now its easy to see that and think "well if the market has that high of expectations, it must be a good investment!" but you must remember (as the P/E ratio points out) those expectations are already factored into the stocks current price. So for the stock to raise, the company has to surpass those already high expectations. However, if the company has completely amazing results but still don't quite match expectations then the stock will dip (or fall).
Another MAJOR thing to consider when looking at any stock in the internet search sector is the expectations (and thus current stock price and P/E ratio) aren't completly based on "who will win" type questions between Google, MS, Yahoo, etc. A large portion of those expectations for each company is based on the forcasted growth of the entire sector. The forcasts are really amazing and that points for good times for companies in that sector but again introduces risk for an investment in any company in that sector. I forget the exact numbers but just for an example lets say its forcasted that spending on on-line advertising has 10x todays number being spent annually by 2010. Now lets say Google wipes everyone else off the board and is the lone on-line ad provider by 2008. Now thats great news, but if in the interm the forcasted growth for the sector just isn't meeting expectations you could still see a drop in Googles price because expecations as a whole aren't being met.
OK the sample scenerio is a bit ridiculous, but it does hopefully show the complexity of the market and the types of things which must be considered in contrast of the original posters wacked out ideas about the market
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert