TomWaits - 6:01 pm on Jun 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

Yahoo was paying Google for use of their search engine. It's not comparable.

Google is paying AOL for the right to plaster AdWords on their site and is either implicitly or explicitly giving them a share of the revenue. Maybe the 60 is guaranteed and the 100 is the upside.

We paid around 10 cents for our Overture clicks on AOL the last few years. Our AOL AdWords clicks now cost us around 40 to 50 cents.

My guess is that Google only needs to grow AdWords for their AOL deal to pay off. AOL traffic can stagnate, and will, but more AdWords ads and higher bidded ads will, I guess, make the 60-100 make sense.