Fight for Yahoo Japan

between Overture and Google

[vitaplease]

Do not know if this is new, but found the revenue sharing interesting..

[news.com.com...]

....Overture expects to share with its partners, on average, about 61 percent of paid-search profits from the fourth quarter this year, 2 percentage points higher than in the third quarter.

One industry executive familiar with Google's revenue-sharing model said that it could pay out as much as 75 percent of its profits from search-engine marketing....

[jeremy goodrich]

One industry executive familiar with Google's revenue-sharing model said that it could pay out as much as 75 percent of its profits from search-engine marketing.

Gotta love those 'annonymous industry executives...it's an easy way of saying, "this is what we're guessing" without having any sources to back it up, imho.

That 61% figure is on the rise, if you look back through Overtures filings from Q2 and Q3, you'll notice the increase...and if you dig back further, you'll note it was smaller before, too.

I'm not an executive, but what if I said, "Google could pay out 80%" or 90%?

It doesn't mean much, that figure, it's just a guess.

2/3 is a big piece of the action...and that seems to be what Yahoo is getting from Overture.

I don't see how Google couldn't give away even more than that, given how eventually, they'll take on the market share in any given country, thus ending over time the need to pay *anything* to their partners.

With that in mind, I'd say the target for a partner of theirs should be 90% if it's a big enough partner. :)

[bill]

There has been speculation about this since Overture made public its intentions to come to Japan. Yahoo is a dominant player in Japan with little competition, so it is understandable that this is being fought over fiercely. The article does give some good background information and drops a few names, but I don't see much here in the way of news unfortunately. They're just playing the guessing game like everyone else did with Yahoo.com not very long ago.

What makes this all very interesting is that the Yahoo Japan situation is very different from Yahoo.com. Because the PPC type market is still really in its infancy here, and there really is no established market to speak of, they could really go any way they like. If Yahoo Japan decides to forge ahead and go it alone, that would be a real interesting development.

Keep in mind that Yahoo only holds a minority share in Yahoo Japan (33.6%). Softbank holds the majority (50.5%) and that company will tend to look for a Japanese solution to their problems. That solution may not include Overture or Google at all...

[vitaplease]

Intersting Bill,

I did not know Yahoo had minority stake's in their daughter(s).

Any other countries around where this is also the case?

[bill]

Well, I'm a little late [webmasterworld.com] reporting on this one, but it looks like Yahoo! Japan went with both Google AdWords and Overture. This certainly does give Overture a big lift in the Japanese PPC market. It'll be fun to see where this goes.