|
|
|
Yahoo restructures technology in bid to upstage Google |
|
|
|
Communication
|
|
Written by Peter Warren
|
|
Tuesday, 02 May 2006 |
Internet search company Yahoo is set to go head to head with rival
Google in a bid to win control of the multi-billion pound internet
advertising market.
Search engine giant Google dominates advertising on the internet, a
phenomenon which has exploded in recent years and is largely
responsible for Google’s $129bn valuation.
However Yahoo, which considers itself the main architect of internet
advertising thanks to a software system called Overture, has long
resented its rival’s dominance in this area.
Now however the firm has declared that it is determined to start a
major battle with Google for domination of the market and has
restructured its company for the ensuing struggle.
‘Internet advertising was something that we built from scratch that
others have subsequently copied,’ said Stephen Taylor, Yahoo Search
Marketing’s regional vice-president. ‘This is the number one
battleground in the advertising space now.
“We are very clear as a business that online search marketing is at the top of our list of priorities.’
In the UK last year online advertising grew by a staggering 65.6%
and generated revenues of £1,366.4m. This represents three quarters of
the market for national newspapers; globally the market is worth
$12.5bn.
The attraction of internet marketing to advertisers its ability to
target adverts directly at the people who are likely to be interested
in the products that advertising is selling.
For example, type wine into an internet search engine and a list of
companies selling wine appears down the right hand side of the screen.
And if you pay more than other advertisers Google or Yahoo will put you at the top of the first search page.
Yahoo’s announcement earlier today (8th May, 2006) that it will
restructure its entire operation to concentrate on the market is an
acknowledgement by the company of the growing importance of the market.
According to Taylor, Yahoo is to focus completely on the internet
advertising market by putting it at the heart of its search software –
a change that will mean that Yahoo’s search and marketing system will
work on mobile phones and handheld devices like Blackberrys as well as
desktop computers and laptops in the future.
Yahoo will also attack areas of perceived weakness in Google’s own
‘Adwords’ system which can make it difficult for advertisers to track
exactly what their adverts are doing.
The new Yahoo system will let an advertiser find out in exact
detail not only how many people are clicking on an advert and how much
they are paying for each click - but also provide them with more
information on how to create and target their adverts. This is one of
the so-called
black arts of internet advertising – optimising - that at the moment is done manually.
“We are going to automate a lot of the optimisation so that people can concentrate on their adverts,” said Taylor.
According to Jonnie Kendall, an expert on adwords who runs
www.monthly-income.biz a web site specialising in teaching people how
to use adwords, the announcement by Yahoo was inevitable.
"This is a massively growing area. We teach people how to get the
most from adwords from both companies. There are a lot of people out
there who use Yahoo's Overture to find out exactly what people are
spending on a word search who combine that information with Google
adwords.
“What Yahoo are doing is making it much easier to optimise their
adverts - that means getting as many people as possible to click on
them – what this will do is get more people to use internet advertising
which makes sense."
|
|
|
|
|