Overture extends MSN deal for Japan & Korea

thru December 2004

[bill]

This isn't really new news, but I thought it deserved its own spot in this forum for future reference.

article [boston.internet.com]

Under terms of the new agreement, Overture will continue to provide paid search listings on MSN Search in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea until December 2004. ... The original agreement was to expire in December 2003. The extension brings the agreements in line with Overture's domestic deal with MSN, which is set to expire in December 2004.

This means your investments in Overture clicks for Asia are good for another year. It will probably take at least that long to get their MSN spider up and going, if that is indeed their intention.

[takagi]

Thanks Bill. BTW, for the more global impact, there is also a thread started in the Overture Pay Per Click forum: Overture extends deal with MSN search - separate from the MSN websites [webmasterworld.com]

Overture Press Release [corporate-ir.net]

American Overture succeeds in extending the contract with MSN in 5 countries including Japan [internet.watch.impress.co.jp] (Japanese)

[whats up skip]

I don't agree with your assumption of the time line for MSN spider. The impression I get is the MSN spider is a backfill data to replace Inktomi and compete with Google for quality of results.

I think the agreement with Overture is secondary as it is for sponsored or premium listings. It will only be an issue if Overture tries to complete head on with MSN in the Portal/search business, which may happen.

I doubt that MSN would have let the cat out of the bag so early if they are not going to start using the search for a year. But time will tell, a year is a long time in the search engine world!

[bill]

I don't agree with your assumption of the time line for MSN spider.

See the 1st post in this thread [webmasterworld.com]:

About the MSN spider, he felt that anybody could send out a spider, but building a full-scale engine is harder than that, and that it would be "18 months at least before MSN could go live with their own crawler based engine."

Do you have some inside information we don't have? This thread started several weeks before Microsoft's announcement about replacing Inktomi.

[takagi]

FYI, I'm not sure if this is related to the Overture deal:

A search for 'loan' on jp.search.msn.com [jp.search.msn.com] shows 3 sponsert links. The same search on beta.jp.search.msn.com [beta.jp.search.msn.com] doesn't have these sponsert links.

Something similar is mentioned for beta.search.msn.co.uk in the thread MSN Beta Search - live on msn.co.uk, looksmart is gone [webmasterworld.com] in forum 7 (UK & Ireland Search Engines).