Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Yahoo’s ad revenues dropped down

I think the recent slow down in Yahoo’s contextual ads business might not be considered as Google’s victory but rather than it seems that something interesting is going on here as a trend, in my view…

Well, it is obvious that Yahoo and MSN are not any serious treat for Google’s contextual products, but their failure to come up with something that practically, conceptually and technically could beat Google’s AdSense / AdWords is opening a serious gap in that particular niche, which is aggressively being addressed by a number of small but very innovative companies spending serious resources and putting lots of efforts on the semantic web and the artificial intelligence by researching and deploying different web-based, web 2.0-dominated contextual models, methods, concepts, algorithms and business models, etc. etc..

What could be seen in this situation is not that Google attracts Yahoo’s and MSN’s dissatisfied web publishers and contextual advertisers, but it seems they are migrating to a number of small to mid level highly aggressive and innovative contextual products spreading around the web.

It is obvious that the contextual business is heating up on the web and it did not start from yesterday; what we see today as a trend might be a result of those small companies that play significant role on the contextual ads arena…and the recent slow down in the Yahoo’s ad revenues might be seen in the perspective of companies like VibrantMedia.com (mouse-over pop-up contextual ads), Quigo.com (contextual links, private label contextual solutions), LinkStorms.com (menu with contextual links on mouse-over), LinkedWords.com (huge web 2.0 contextual platform, free contextual links, free context ads) Clicksor.com (contextual advertising), Text-link-ads.com (flat-rate contextual links, large inventory), just to name a few…

To conclude, Google is not necessarily the reason behind Yahoo’s slow-down in the ad business. At the other hand Yahoo and other giants are needed on the web to keep Google honest and fair, hopefully.