On April 16th, Bing and Yahoo announced a change to their longstanding search partnership. Search Engine Land posted an immediate follow-up to the announcement with useful details and analysis, and followed up with an update last week that provided more information.
In short, the 2009 Bing-Yahoo deal that required Yahoo to serve Bing ads on desktop search (the fact that mobile wasn’t included was a loophole) has been modified such that 51% of the ads that Yahoo serves on desktop must be Bing ads. This change opens up the possibility for the rest of desktop search traffic (the other 49%) to come from other partners or from the Yahoo Gemini platform, which has been serving ads to Yahoo Mobile for the past year.
While it’s hard to say exactly what impact this will have on the kinds of ads that appear on Yahoo, it’s safe to say that the similarities in paid search on Yahoo and Bing—which we’ve noted in our Report on Branded Keywords—may soon diverge. We’ll monitor this development through the rest of the year and provide an update if we find substantial changes in the type and quality of ads appearing on Yahoo.
How do you think the the new Bing-Yahoo agreement will influence paid search? Let us know in the comments below or by contacting us at BrandVerity!
