YHOO should be a good test case on director personal liability. I hope Icahn pushes the issue.

Jim Cramer was all gung-ho Randian libertarian prior to the sub-prime meltdown, then he was crying for the government to come rescue his investment buddies.

Atleast go out with a bang, something that would f up Google and Microsoft wood be great.

Google currently uses its anti-thin-affiliate tools to kill the rankings of sites with CJ or other advertising on the site. As a publisher of thousands of vertical market sites, with high dependence on natural search we are afraid not to have adwords on any page we want well ranked.

Adsense pay-per-click is a poor revenue model for a decent site. Eventually you’ll see more and more publishers move to CPA/direct referral/leadgen/embedded transaction models and away from adsense. Today, that’s a harder choice to make because it can kill your search position.

Google should not be allowed to control both. Near monopoly control over both natural search and site monetization is destructive. Force them to unbundle and the web will be healthier going forward.

Michael has a voice that the FTC might hear.

Yang passed up a big premium for this? They have admitted that despite Billions in revenue, they cannote innovate. Move on.

There’s some sloppy contract work – it is unclear from the language if GOOG has an out if the gross revenues from this deal are less than $83.3 mil for the prior 4 calendar months in total, or if the average monthly revenue for the prior 4 months is less than $83.3 mil EACH MONTH.

I would guess that it is the latter, and if so, this indicates an expectation that this relationship will generate signficant volume. $83.33 x 12 months = $1 billion in annual gross revenue. That is a big number when compared to Y’s current revenues, especially given that this is only for North America.

YHOO had $1.8 bil in total global revenue in Q1, but “mktg services” is only a portion and US/CA is only a portion. They don’t break it out by both geography and product line together, but back of the envelope calculations would indicate that US/CA “mktg services” revenues are $1.0-1.2 bil in Q1 – or $4-5bil annualized.

So a GOOG deal at $1 bil in annual revenues would account for 20-25% of that total. But remember, that revenue figure includes search and media advertising revenue. I assume the GOOG deal is only for search, not media. The YHOO press release doesn’t break out their mktg services revenue by search/media (i’m sure it’s available somewhere but i’m too lazy to look), but use a simple 50/50 split — this indicates they expect GOOG deal to be driving roughly half of the US-based search revenues within 10 months!

http://www.read...ex.php?rta=blog