Microsoft and Yahoo! Deal Gets Clearance

Microsoft and Yahoo received approval from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union to move forward on the search deal aimed at taking market share from search engine giant Google. In a joint announcement Thursday, Microsoft and Yahoo reported that the two will now turn attention to implementing the deal that should begin in the coming days. It will involve transitioning Yahoo’s algorithmic and paid-search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ search advertisers globally, according to the companies. Aside from periodic phone, email and webinars, the two companies will communicate the transition to advertisers through a dedicated Web site. Microsoft and Yahoo execs believe the team spearheading the project can make the transition in the United States by the end of this year, but may wait until 2011 if they find it will disrupt sales for retailers during the holiday season. All global customers and partners are expected to transition by early 2012.

Read More: MediaPost

The Rubicon Project Details Future Plans

Digital advertising infrastructure company the Rubicon Project today at the PaidContent 2010 conference has outlined its corporate strategy going forward. Essentially, the company is declaring that you’ll soon be able to stick a fork in the ad server, and to underline its vision it has published a fairly interesting manifesto on its website that’s well worth a read if you have a vested interest in the Internet advertising marketplace. The company also announced that it has tapped Allen & Company as its financial advisor to support the company’s goals, which it says will include strategic acquisitions, platform expansion and other paths to accelerated international growth. The Rubicon Project, which launched in 2007, in its manifesto takes aim at players in the ad server technology market, saying that it is currently in a ‘dangerous’ state of status quo. The company says it will fight to overcome the increasing price erosion that publishers have witnessed over the past few years because the balance in the marketplace has so far favored the demand-side of the equation.

Read More: TechCrunch

Why Doesn’t Amazon Build A Huge Ad Play?

Amazon is just a fascinating company.  I have never worked there and their performance over the years has been amazing to watch.  In particular, it hasn’t always been obvious that their  heavy R&D expenditure over the years was justified compared to their low operating margins.  Look at the companies in recent years from cloud services like EC2 to the Kindle.  And of course, you can see there e-commerce growth truly outpace the competition. I really don’t know why they are not thinking thru ways in which to more greatly to broaden their reach.  I did a post last year on why Amazon should buy Twitter.  Out of all of their investments in non-ecommerce related businesses, I have always wondered why Amazon had not more fully invested in building a world-class advertising play.  Amazon possesses all of the necessary components to build a world-class advertising platform. Amazon has a huge affiliate network called Amazon Associates.  A guesstimate is that an Amazon affiliate network has 2 million affiliates generating on average 5,000 impressions per month per publisher, or 120 billion impressions per year.  This is an imperfect estimate but most certainly if Amazon were generating less than 20 billion impressions per month via its affiliate base then it would not currently be ranked as a top 30 ad network as it is today.  The three big guys make Amazon’s advertising capability look like market share mice nuts – the  top three ad networks (Platform A, Yahoo, and Google).

Read More: StartupWhisperer