Overture hasn’t released any updates because for years they’ve been trying to release their new Panama product and have poured all engineering effort into it instead of gradual enhancements to what they have. As any reader of Joel on Software knows, rebuilding a product from scratch rarely results in the accelerated launch schedule and simpler architecture that you anticipate.

Hopefully when it is released they will do a bit of catching up with Google’s nice (but overly complex) Adwords tool.

I sincerely hope that some of the smaller CPC/CPA networks get their act together and start attracting a more diverse suite of advertisers and publishers, or start building unique tools that go beyond the standard ‘bid for a keyword’ model. It would be great to have a number of high-value ad networks for a publisher to participate in and reap the bucks from.

As for the minimum bid price increases that the other poster was referring to, he was right: Google actually did announce an increase to minimum bids. Here’s some information about it: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=1912

- Tom

Ok, so Yahoo’s stock got hammered yesterday for warning that sales revenue would be slower in the third quarter and that they are seeing slower growth in the automotive and financial services sector. Yahoo’s total revenue was $5.3 billion last…

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 http://VibrantMedia.com (mouse-over pop-up contextual ads), http://Quigo.com (contextual links, private label contextual solutions), http://LinkStorm.com (menu with contextual links on mouse-over), http://LinkedWords.com (huge web 2.0 contextual platform, free contextual links, free context ads) http://Clicksor.com (contextual advertising), http://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.

The future economic growth is in India, China and Asia. That is were future online ad sales or any industry for that matter should focus for growth.

Additionally, Overture’s (Yahoo Search Marketing) product is difficult to use and there haven’t been any enhancements in years. It take me 3x’s as long to submit bids or make bid changes (vs Google) and then they reject 75% of the bids - for 1/10 of the revenue.

And because they’re rejecting so many advertiser’s bids, consumers aren’t finding what they want and are going to Google, MSN and other Search Engines. Google’s keyword tool (which has leap-frogged Overture’s antiquated tool, in fact, leap-frogged light-years ahead) might yield 200 possible listings for a single term, while I’m lucky to find 50 with Overture’s. It’s suggesting to me that fewer people are searching for different terms on Yahoo - or maybe their keyword tool needs to be updated.

Currier - Google doesn’t “raise prices”. If prices are rising in your category, it’s because OTHER ADVERTISERS are bidding up prices or it’s because your quality score has gone down. More likely the former. Google is a Silent Auction and they don’t set prices for any terms but they do have minimum bids — $.01 for a listing, although your ad might not run if your quality score isn’t high enough, i.e. the keyword isn’t relevant, your CTR is low, etc. Look at your competitors and see who’s in the top positions - they’re the ones “raising prices”. There may be a new competitor that’s trying to get into the market.

However, I do agree that there should be more, better competition. It’s hard to believe that they spent so much time and money and built such a buggy, hard-to-use product (to be nice). There system is slow, isn’t intutive and doesn’t work half the time. Not sure how they could NOT improve on what Google and Overture had already built. But, MSN’s AdCenter took away about half of Overture’s volume - so you need to advertising that property.

I understand Overture is coming out with Panama soon, which is supposed to clear up some of the issues, but if they don’t relax their editorial guidelines, advertisers are going to keep deserting themselves en masse. They recently lost ESPN as a Content customer - who’s next? Maybe IVillage? How many advertisers and clients will they have to lose before they wake up.

My clients and I refer to Overture as the Editor Nazi’s. Unless they change that - there doomed to 2nd-tier status or worse.

Things google does good with adsense that yahoo doesn’t:

1. Very intuitive service great user interface.
2. Ad prices become inactive if your bid is too low or if they aren’t clicked on forcing users to bid higher.
3. They make it easier to submit multiple ads.
4. Integration with urchin (analyze.google.com)

The list can go on and on.

Emphasis mine. The fed’s been on a push these past couple years to raise interest rates, and both sectors mentioned are sensitive to movement in that area. (Both essentially for the same reasons, that more expensive money means smaller budgets for consumers to get big ticket items like cars, or to buy/refi a house, or to invest in the market on margin, or whatever.)

If it was a downturn across the board from every class of advertiser, I’d be concerned, but just these two I don’t think is cause for alarm.

If Yahoo search advertising was any good, they could be making a fortune off of dissaffected Google advertisers looking for a place to spend thier money. Unfortunatly, their system continues to suck, and they don’t seem to be capitalizing on the opportunity.

I’ve been spending more of my advertising money on MSN these days, but their system is still very immature. I keep wishing for Yahoo and MSN to really step up to bat so they could keep Google honest.

People are totally sick of blinking crap…me among them. I *never* click on ads. I think another critical mistake is stretching your community out on the rack with too many crappy services that are ploys for more ad revenue.

http://www.markseremet.com

Also seems like marketers took over the company - from what they indicated, their marketing budgets for simple products such as messenger were ridiculously high. I kept wondering whom it’s targetted at - most people who don’t have messengers join the ones that their friends have.

I also kept thinking - they could develop a couple of solid products with a fraction of that much money… But they prefer to flush it…