Investors Rebuff Overture

Overture drops earnings forecast by a whopping 39%

[martinibuster]

From The Street [thestreet.com]

The company gave three reasons for the shortfall: lower-than-expected revenue in the U.S., traffic acquisition costs at the high end of the company's previously forecast range, and increased technology and infrastructure expenses, including investments in World Wide Web searching.

[jeremy goodrich]

In other words -> Over is Over? :) he he, they still got a lot of cash though.

Looks like they'll need to make 1 of their new search engines a real desitanation site, very quickly.

[chiyo]

PPC search engine advertising is definately a growing and high potential market to say the least. But they are in danger of being outgoogled. The rush to buy their customers like ATW and AV was always going to be a risky strategy - but I think they had very little other choice.

Outgoogled - because Google's strategy and position looks good. A mass of existing users and customers, lower minimum costs meaning people can jump in and try with less risk, (which may just trump OV's seeming strategy of getting rid of small advertisers for just higher value larger advertisers - usually thats a good idea.. but this is the Web, and i think google understands it better), and a more "freindly, common-man" brand.

It may work out that its easier to expand to PPC from a search engine user base, than the other way around.

OV had first mover advantage, bit i wonder now the value of that.

Its a worry to me. We need a strong competitive PPC market, and really OV and Adwords are the only real international players.