The title of this blog is a homage to one of the great sports announcing calls of my lifetime when Howard Cosell called the Ali-Fraser fight.
However in this case it looks like Yahoo is losing the fight for search engine share.
According to comScore Yahoo’s search market share in November fell to 17.5% from 18% in October marking the the lowest share ever recorded for Yaho.
Yahoo has lost share for 10-straight months.
Bing gained 0.4% of the search market up to 10.3%.
Google share grew to take 65.6% of the search market in November.
That’s the largest share Google has ever had.
Meanwhile, As the closing date nears for the search rivals’ deal, some say Yahoo is reaching a tipping point that could make or break the value of its partnership.
Under the 10-year agreement, Microsoft will power the searches that users make on Yahoo.com. In return, Microsoft will pay Yahoo 88% of the revenue it gains from searches on Yahoo’s sites. Yahoo.com and Bing.com will maintain their own branding but search results on Yahoo.com will say “powered by Bing.”
“There is no getting around the fact that the market share trend for Yahoo is absolutely awful,” said Benjamin Schachter, analyst for Broadpoint AmTech. “The Microsoft deal does not guarantee any search revenue, only revenue-per-search levels; therefore, search share and volume are as critical as ever.”
Still, another school of thought says not all is lost for Yahoo.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft have poured millions of dollars into advertising campaigns to get users to come to their Web sites. Yahoo’s new “It’s Y!ou” campaign has been plastered all over billboards and television spots. Microsoft just launched its new highly publicized Bing iPhone App on Tuesday.
As a result, some advertisers believe users who search on those sites are more likely to indulge a sales pitch and therefore are more likely to click on their ads than Google’s users.
“Microsoft and Yahoo offer quality versus quantity,” said Ruby. “The traffic they drive is more valuable than Google’s in some advertisers’ eyes, because their users are going to be delivering higher margins.”
So even as Google continues to gain share at “Microhoo’s” expense, Yahoo and Microsoft live on to fight for high-quality searchers as a way to
The Ali -Frazier fights were classics. Two great champions battling it out. Not sure we could say the same thing here. Will Yahoo become Ya who? I hope not. I really would like to see good news coming out of Yahoo as they are and have always been domainer friendly.
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only one thing is always sure in the SE saga: Google becomes every day bigger
and, someday (in 2012, I believe) Yahoo and Bing will be sold to Google for $1
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I agree with you. that day by day the popularity of google is increasing so much that one day will come when bing and yahoo will be sold to google.
Yahoo has no one to blame but themselves. By far, the most frustrating of all search engines and we’ve had our fair share of experiences with them that continues to this day. For example, do a search of “whisky” on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Our Whisky.com is #1 on Bing, #2 on Google and absolutely nowhere to be found on Yahoo. Why? Who cares anymore. It’s certainly not because they have a great search engine and we’re far from the only people with this experience. Adios El Kabong.