An Alliance for the Ages
February 22 2010 by Erik Eitel ~ 0 CommentsFor all of you people who have Bing ad credits, I have good news! Last Thursday the Microsoft and Yahoo! search alliance finally got clearance from the United States Department of Justice and the International Commission to make their agreement official. The alliance will run for ten years starting at the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 and last until 2021.
What does this agreement mean?
- Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace.
- Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to certain Yahoo! search technologies.
- Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results.
- Full implementation of the terms of the Search Alliance is expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory clearance.
- Yahoo!’s Sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients, and Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.
What does this mean for the consumer? Your adCenter credits will soon be used for all of Bing, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, and several other sites including the Wall Street Journal digital network, Fox.com, MSNBC.com, and Buy.com.
Will this alliance change the face of the online ad business? Maybe. Now companies will no longer have to sign up for many accounts to effectively advertise across many sites. A single adCenter account will make your ads viewable on all of the above mentioned sites. This may finally put pressure on Google’s adWords program. While Google is largely popular and heavily used, companies may begin to find the the Yahoo!-Microsoft alliance to be of a greater benefit and provide a larger bang for their buck.
If you want to learn more about the alliance you can visit the Search Alliance official website.
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