Panama

There is a lot of buzz around Yahoo! being in trouble. In terms of share of the search market in the US they lost a lot of ground to Google last year. Their numbers only looked OK because of the growth of the display advertising market, and Wired magazine took a big swipe at them, wondering if it was curtains for Yahoo! With this kind of background I went into a meeting with our Yahoo! search contact who was going to unveil Panama their much delayed and talked about search product. Once he got through all the new features, I realized it was… Adwords. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s interesting to see that all their sweat has resulted in a copy of their largest competitors product. The thing that I found very interesting is that they, at the same time, reduced minimum bids from 10p/10c down to 5p/5c. in terms of increasing their revenues I think this was a very smart move. They will now become a possibility to a lot of advertisers who were only focused on Google. Knowing that their CTR is lower than Google’s too, they have to do something to better their proposition to advertisers. Panama launches in the next month or so here, I’ll keep you posted as to how we find it.