Forum Moderators: open
the only rationale i can figure out is that overture has much less inventory space for a large number of advertisers, and so can charge a higher rate; i just wonder why more advertisers aren't leaving overture in favor of google (the quality of traffic seems about the same). anyone have a sense that overture is thriving or going down?
There's no reason for either of them to buckle, they're like Coke and Pepsi.
if i was in a PPC engine's shoes, the $.10 minimum bid doesn't really make sense because it seems there's a big chunk of the PPC market where the ROI only holds for an advertiser if CPC is around $.05 or less (e.g., small/startup businesses, cheap products, affiliate advertising, etc.); bumping up to $.10 would scare off a lot of spending, erase that revenue, and leave a lot of search term inventory unsold. i wonder if overture has experienced this as a result of their $.10 hike, and had a lot of advertisers going to adwords.
i understand that there's a certain threshold for the SE where publishing an ad no longer covers its costs, but i can't imagine it's very high (e.g., more than a penny or two per click).
as you can tell, i'd be spend more with overture (and i think there would be many others as well) if they went back down to $.05 minimum; i just wonder why the chances seems so remote.
Grandaddies may last until 2005.
Don't forget, MSN will be the last major player to split and start their own PPC. It would not surprise me if MSN did minimun .01 bids for the first month to get all google/overture customers in less than a week. Don't mess with MSN, and in this case, will help the advertisers!
It would lower Adwords' revenue to increase minimum bid. There are lots of things that can be successfully marketed to large numbers of users at $0.05 but cannot be at $0.10.
When Overture UK raised their minimum to 10p -- no grandfathering, I had to shut down a client's program there. On most of my client's terms, there's now no one advertising.
This bid raising stuff is very foolish for the PPC companies. Adwords would make more money by *lowering* their minimum bid.
The same would be true for Overture, except for their overhead problem. Overture should simply charge a small fee for each new term added to a program -- to cover their editorial expenses.
Who said anything about MSN launching their own PPC engine?
They can't even get their Organic search going?
MS is caught in the Corporate "Glut" trap. They spend months having meetings to discuss planning future meetings, and never seem to make much progress.
They turned a blind eye to search, because they didn't think the returns justified the costs at that time.. They should have bought Inktomi or FAST, and Overture..
Netscape once thought the same of MSN, slow, big, corporate. Where are they now?
MSN is going to turn search, and the PPC industry, upside down in 2005. I bet you google will even sell out to google. MSN IS THAT SCARY.
jd
