At the moment Yahoo! and Bing contribute to Google’s ad revenues, (like Google needed help!)
But Yahoo! and Bing could turn this around overnight and get Google contributing to their bottom line by sending visitors to see their adverts.
Currently Google gets 28% of its ad revenue from its Adsense program.
If Bing and/or Yahoo! were to offer a similar program they could expect to get a significant greater percentage of their revenues from their Adsense-like program than Google does from Adsense.
Why?
Unlike search where people are happy with the results that Google gives I would say website publishers are not so satisfied depending on Google so much for their website ad revenues.
To go into detail. The number of search queries dealt with by Bing and Yahoo! is considerably less than that dealt with by Google. As an example say Bing and Yahoo! deal with 10% of all search queries combined and Google deals with the remaining 90%.
As Bing and Yahoo! will tell you, competing with Google in the search industry is extremely difficult so we can probably say they will not make big inroads into this 90% in the near future unless Google drops the ball badly.
However Bing and Yahoo! can make big in roads into Google’s Adsense market overnight.
In short, all of the sites on the internet using Google Adsense would probably want to give at least one section of their website to an Adsense-like program from Bing or Yahoo!
As a conservative estimate if Bing and /or Yahoo! said they were going to start offering an Adsense-like program I would say conservatively, within 1 month 50% of all sites showing Google Adsense would also be showing Bing/Yahoo! ads.
Given that Bing and Yahoo! ad revenues from search pale in comparison to Google, the percentage of revenue they would get from their Adsense-type program would be significantly more than what Google gets at 28%.
I would estimate that the revenue they could get from their Adsense type program would at a minimum match the revenue they currently get from search ads and in all likelihood their Adsense-type revenue could double their search ad revenue almost immediately.
So to reiterate what Yahoo! and Bing should do to more than double their ad revenues in a month, they should offer an Adsense-type program for website publishers.
Not only would they increase their revenue they could also take big cuts out of Google’ s Adsense revenues.
I have heard Steve Ballmer talks to analysts about offering ads for content on other sites and he poured cold water on the idea. His argument is that content based advertising is such a small piece of the internet advertising revenue landscape (or something along those lines)
In short, his reasoning is completely flawed.
By offering an Adsense-type program to website publishers he would be increasing the number of eyeballs landing of Bing adverts by over 400% in under a month, using the conservative assumptions detailed above.
Maybe Google could argue that 28% of revenue is not critical but assuming Bing deals with around 10% of the search traffic that Google deals with and considering that Bing could get adverts potentially on half of all sites that currently carry Adsense ads, the potential for Bing to get the majority of its revenue from content advertising is obvious.
To suggest otherwise is foolish and is squandering a golden stream of revenue. The fruit does not hang much lower than this.
In the past Yahoo! has made huge mistakes with its Overture product. The problem with Overture is that Yahoo! employees were deciding where ads were to show and not the advertiser. Not only did this mean massive staff costs to manually review ads, advertisers were also unhappy that they could not target their ads they way they wanted to.
As long as Bing and Yahoo! keep close to the Adsense model of letting the customer decide they will not go far wrong with their Adsense-type product
Are you listening Yahoo! and Bing? You could increase the audience for your ads by as much as 400% in a month and you could double your ad revenues in a month. The only thing you have to do is support the people who contribute to the internet.
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