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Opinions? (I know you got 'em!)
Consider this from Lycos's side:
1) I get many of FindWhat's customers, but now I own the relationship and can cross-sell them marketing services.
2) I get to use FindWhat as a tried and tested infrastructure, and get them to do account management with little or no investment. If it works, I can build my own during the deal.
3) I get more leverage in renegotiating my contract with Overture when the term is up, because now I have 10K advertisers and a real service.
Looks like FindWhat just spawned another potential ppc player. For Overture, Lycos represents small % of traffic and revenue (look at your logs).
He who owns the distribution in this game seems to be winning, since there are a very small number of huge sites that have a lot of negotiating leverage.
OTOH OV has just won Lycos.Europe, with lots of portals in most of the bigger online markets, and won them from Espotting.
Even when Lycos.Europe follows up with AdBuyer I don't see this being a mortal blow for OV, really.
How long until every search engine decides to create their own PPC model?
It just doesn't make sense to pay an outside vendor for something you can do yourself.
Revenue
Full Year 2003: $850-900 million
Traffic Acquisition Costs as a Percentage of Revenue
Full Year 2003: 60-62%
Income Before Income Tax
Full Year 2003: $110-130 million
Net Income
Full Year 2003: $60-70 million
Net Income Per Share
Full Year 2003: $0.90-$1.05
EBITDA
Full Year 2003: $125-150 million
Found here:
[overture.com...]
TOP NEWS ITEM
It just doesn't make sense to pay an outside vendor for something you can do yourself.
The reasons many companies pay for outsourcing a service is because the other companies already have the infrastructure, the software, employees, customers, and whatever else it takes. That is why Overture still lands big players like Yahoo!. I don't think Yahoo! and others want the hassle of building a PPCSE from scratch, and then having to amass customers. They are not in that biz-- they want to be a portal. Now, that's not to say that they could not do it, but it is a reason why they go to Goverture.
I do think Yahoo! should create their own PPC, but with a twist-- allow companies to bid on keywords and return the category listing, instead of a SE that relies upon finding keywords within the lousy descriptions they rewrote.
I do think Overture will be around for a while...maybe not as prevalent as they are now, but still around.
