mack - 9:01 am on Oct 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

One of the biggest reasons Yahoo! doesn't have enough of an advertiser pool is due to lack of web properties to display ads. By taking on Ask, and giving the advertising industry a major shake up it could result on more advertisers bidding in Yahoo!

As a few including myself have mentioned, its a case of 2 birds with one stone, what ever revenue they generate and what ever Google looses.

Another way to look at this, we agree that currently Yahoo couldn't support Ask, but they (m$ and Y!) would be taking in 100% of the ad revenue, not a cut from a third party, so the drop on cpc by using Yahoo ads might not be as damming as we think.

Also by powering Ask using Bing, the operational costs will be a lot lower. In its current state Ask search will be far from cheap to run, kill it and use Bing. If they can stop bleeding money concentrate on gaining new advertisers due to new properties to advertise on and retain 100% of the cpc then I still think this is a wise move.

Mack.