Why the Microsoft and Yahoo merger makes sense for webmasters and web users
Written on April 23, 2008 – 7:08 pm | by admin
Microsoft has been trying for more than a year now to acquire Yahoo without much success. Yahoo executives refuse to sell their online portal to the Gates’ evil empire and the dance continues. Everything about the possibility of merging the two giant companies has been said already by everyone in online and print media. It is not my intention to repeat all that with this post so I will keep it brief and to the point.
What I want to focus on when it comes to the possible merger between Microsoft and Yahoo is the overall impact this will have to the online marketplace. In my opinion, this impact will be mostly positive and it will not lead to another Microsoft monopoly as many believe. The way I see it, currently there is an online monopoly and that is Google.
Google has the best search engine returning the most relevant results for all user queries. There is no doubt that as far as online search engines go, Google takes the cake. And this is after thousands of people spam its Web index in hopes of making easy money. Google’s advertising products including AdSense, AdWords and the recently acquired DoubleClick are definitely the best ones available today. Many webmasters and affiliate marketers make a good living because of Google’s advertising products.
Google being a monopoly is, however, bad news for both those trying to make money online and Web users. Why?
For regular Web users the problem is that little innovation in search engine technology is currently occurring. The fact that Google dominates the market and that they are very large and slow to make changes to their search algorithms means that little happens in improving the underlining search engine. Yahoo and Microsoft have been unable to create a competitive search engine on their own. A merger would make sense in terms of giving users an alternative search engine and at the same time forcing all parties to innovate at a higher pace. One way that Google’s monopoly is hurting the Web is their refusal to support the move towards the Semantic Web.
For webmasters having two large companies competing with each other for displaying ads on their online properties can only be good news. At the moment, everyone knows that if for any reason Google terminates their account, it is next to impossible to properly monetize a low to medium traffic site. Large sites can make money with a second or third tier advertising network and affiliate marketing but this is not the case for the smaller publishers. Google can be very vigilant when it comes to terminating accounts simply because they have a monopoly with AdSense; of course, in many cases it doesn’t help when webmasters violate the program’s TOS just to make a few extra dollars but there are a good number of innocent publishers that are terminated with no good reason. Yahoo and Microsoft have not been able to create advertising programs that are as good as those offered by Google. A merger should create some good competition to Google giving webmasters a good alternative way for monetizing their web sites and at the same time forcing Google to respect publishers more.
There are probably other reasons why a Microsoft-Yahoo merger makes sense. I wrote this article simply to focus on the fact that said merger would create real competition to Google taking away the monopoly the latter have enjoyed in recent years. Both web users and web masters will benefit from such a merger. I just wish Yahoo was not so stubborn!
Tags: Google monopoly, Microsoft, Microsoft-Yahoo merger, Yahoo
