The great migration to Microsoft has begun.
This is a critical week in the transition of pay-per-click advertising traffic in the Yahoo-Microsoft alliance.
As of yesterday morning Yahoo had shifted more than 30% of ad serving to Microsoft AdCenter instead of its own search marketing ad console. By the end of the week the company expects to have shifted 50%-60%.
There’s no doubt that some smaller advertisers won’t make the transition over to Microsoft. But Yahoo has been doing everything it can to make sure even the smallest advertisers sign up with Microsoft Adcenter, including sending multiple emails and even robocalls.
Yahoo says that, combined with Microsoft sites, it delivers over 1/3 of all search queries in the U.S.
Yahoo-based parking companies will be affected by this change. In the long run revenue should increase as more advertisers work with Microsoft to tap into the enlarged search audience it can now deliver, driving up bid prices.
Brad says
This is great news for services like TrafficZ, Parked, and Skenzo as now they will have good solid long lasting relationship with Microsoft that is on the up and up, rather than Yahoo which was on a decline.
I think this deal will prove to be great competition to G finally and M/Y may prove stronger than G in the parking space.
todaro says
does this mean i will make more money?
Brad says
Yes
:: Domainers Gate :: says
but the Bing+Yahoo merge can’t beat Google
good says
It´s not about beating, it´s about competing. That´s atleast something. Kind of ironic that we are cheering for MI-CRO-SOFT…
Chris Nielsen says
“does this mean i will make more money?”
“Yes”
Are you sure…? My Yahoo-feed parking provider did not indicate there would be any changes, and in fact did not even seem to know much about this shift. It could be they are clueless, but my take on the “Search Alliance” is this:
Yahoo and Microsoft made a god-awful deal out of desparation. Rather than making things better, they took two 2nd rate offerings (and perhaps not equal ones at that) and have made one large offering that may have good and bad aspects.
A good aspect is that if you advertise on MS now your ads will also appear on Yahoo.
A bad aspect is that the histoicly (in my experience) poor quality sites and traffic from Yahoo is part of the expanded exposure. I just reported a Yahoo-feed parked domain to the parking company because there were 2 clicks at 100% CTR from a domain on a topic that had nothing to do with the campaign topic.
A good aspect is that if you see your costs go up and your conversions go down, MS lets you opt to only show your ads on MS and Y. You can not only opt out of the content network (a good idea unless you watch it like a hawk) but also the search partners(something Google needed to offer now!). One of my clients is going to do this on ALL OF THEIR ACCOUNTS to reduce the fraud and junk traffic.
A bad aspect is that once clients block the content and search partners, those of us parking domains will not have their ads showing on our domains.
A bad aspect is that if you already advertised on Yahoo, you have to deal with them for what you have on MS. And part of this change may be forced to switch from “post-pay” to “per-pay”, but I had 2 Yahoo reps tell me two different things. In one client accounts, it is true.
I know most domainers only think about the clicks and money they get, but not caring about the advertisers is a mistake, because if the go away, so does the money.
The answer to this situation is a “Bid for Flat Rate” advertising model like Adbrite has. With it, domainers can still get the income from their valuable traffic, but advertisers are also protected from click fraud.
And as far as “long lasting” goes, I think the contract is for a 3-year term. If MS doesn’t own Yahoo by that time, I think it’s anyone’s guess what will happen…!
Chris Nielsen says
Sorry, I forgot one other thought, a bad aspect for domainers: I expect bids to go down. While there are going to be more advertisers in one pool, many of the advertisers are not going to be able to increase budgets for greater exposure. In order to limit costs, they are going to lower bids and still get exposure because there is so much inventory now. They won’t want their ads to go off-line midday because they maxed their budget, they want them to keep showing. Look for lower bids as the preferred way to achive this AND to help lower click fraud by having ads appear lower in the results.
Brad says
Long story short, I think parking companies should renew their alliance with Microwho because it may finally lead to something better in the near future.
In teh short term your earnings may be worse. But long term may be better.
Chris Nielsen says
I have domains at TrafficZ and I think I am seeing some increased traffic, but I am also seeing much lower CPC. This could be just my account since all are going to be different. But I think TrafficZ and maybe other providers are dealing with Yahoo and not MS. I know the advertisers that moved from Yahoo to MS were pretty much required to retain the connection with Yahoo and their reps. The same idea may be true for parking as well. Yahoo just feeds providers ads from MS in place of their own.
I think this deal is good for MS, but bad for Yahoo in the long run. As I mentioned above, one of my clients has stopped running AdCenter ads on the search partners and content, which includes sites like TrafficZ.