Yahoo hired Overture Executive

First Steps towards its own PPC?

[gopi]

Yahoo confirmed today that it has hired Overture's vice president of search Tim Cadogan to become its own vice president of search

Analysts are wondering is it a first step in phasing out overture and going towards an Yahoo inhouse PPC platform...

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-982414.html

[gopi]

Overture will have noting left if MSN will also go in this route :)

[Shakil]

Havent Overture got long term agreements in place.

Pretty sure that is the case, so they wouldnt be blown out overnight, would they.

I am sure likes of MSN and Freeserve are commited to Overture for quite a number of years.

maybe I got it wrong.

Shak

[lazerzubb]

Why not, PPC Engines, is not as hard to create as a search engine like Google, Inktomi or Fast.
The most common problem PPC engines have is how to get the traffic.
Yahoo have solved that one from the beginning they released there website.
So yes i would certainly not be suprised if we saw one soon.

Shak, have found this One so far [biz.yahoo.com]
Funny thing though This [google.com] was released the day after?

Here is the One you are looking for shak [stocks.usatoday.com]

[edited by: lazerzubb at 10:31 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2003]

[Shakil]

The implementation of the non-exclusive agreement will commence shortly after the launch of Overture's service in Japan planned for this December. The term of the agreement is at least 18 months.
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non-exclusive eh :)

Shak

[gopi]

This are the 3 important components for a PPC engine ...Traffic, Editors , Software...

Yahoo already have the first 2 ...Developing a PPC S/W may not take more than 3 months for their army of developers....the thing is they even dont have to hire more people for a PPC platform... they have all editors , developers and sales reps ...

IMHO Overture dont have a value in itself...it dont have traffic , its product is damn easy to replicate... Their only safeguard is their controversial PPC Patent...I guess yahoo will wait until something comes out of the Google-Overture lawsuit :)

[EliteWeb]

Yahoo will have its own type of PPC, I was talking with a rep and he told me they have campaigns running in specific industrys that their Yahoo people show up before the other overture ads do and they will work with that more.

One thing Yahoo has realized is that promoting google's logo screwed them and that they do have a market share so they can do whatever they want with advertisement. :)

[2_much]

It would make perfect sense for them to have their own PPC.

In their earnings report they declared that a lot of it was due to earnings from Overture. But they're paying out a lot of money to them. So now they're working on their own so they can keep the cash and have more flexibility.

[rogerd]

It's a pretty good bet that their objective in hiring this guy wasn't to create an algorithm that provides even better search results than Google's. :)

Overall, though, I'm surprised it has taken Yahoo this long to put a proprietary PPC scheme in motion. Back when the internet bubble was bursting and it became clear that advertising was a tough way to make a buck on the web, I really expected Yahoo to move rapidly into PPC. I'm sure Overture offered a quick, no-investment way to monetize Yahoo searches, but at some point one would expect Yahoo to decide to incur some cost and go for 100% of the revenue.

[mayor]

Maybe Yahoo is gonna have Tim Cadogan head up their new subsidiary, Inktomi, once the deal is done.

[rogerd]

I wonder if the used an executive search firm to put the deal together.

[henrikt]

A fourth important part of a PPC seaech engine is having many customers bidding on keywords, as that drives the average price per click up. Yahoo would need to get an average of at least 80 % of Overture's average payment per click for an internal PPC scheme to be a good idea financially. My guess is that Overture is pretty good in driving up average bids as just the top thrre (or so) results show up at their distribution partners, so this wouldn't be easy even for Yahoo. Just my 2 cents.

[martinibuster]

I'm not sure what it's like for the rest of you, but it seems like there are many more people searching through Y than MSN.

On another front, the legal one, Overture could always slow them down with litigation or the threat of litigation.

Maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges but something similar happened in the automobile industry when a car company hired away a spanish vw executive and vw sued and won because they claimed that he had used confidential vw knowledge, trade secrets that belonged to vw.

Could get muddy, you know

[Jack_Frost]

The whole industry is too incestuous right now because the companies can not priortize everything. It's a captialist's nature to crave for more...more money, more control, more power. Unless there are serious technology or legal impediments, I can't imagine Google, Yahoo, or MSN sharing the same search or PPC supplier for too long.

I would not be surprised to see Yahoo buy Overture. Why not get an insider to help determine the true value and put together an acquisition plan.

[KevinC]

Personaly I like to hear this kind of stuff. Lets me know that things are staying all google all the time - things are changing and things are not going to stay the same. Lots of interesting things to come in the next year!

[ideavirus]

Reading the comments here and the happenings...I guess it's going to be Google v/s the rest

Interesting development, though!