The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the U.S. Justice Department has hired a well-known lawyer for a possible antitrust lawsuit against Google. The lawyer, Sanford Litvack, was the Justice Department antitrust chief for President Jimmy Carter as well as a former vice chairman of Disney and partner at law firm Hogan & Hartson. The report says that it is not clear if the possible challenge would be to the Google-Yahoo search advertising partnership alone or if it would encompass Google’s overall online-advertising business. Lawyers familiar with the review told the Journal that “For weeks, U.S. lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal.”
Category: Yahoo
Yahoo Hires New U.S. Advertising Sales Chief
Yahoo has hired a new advertising chief, Joanne Bradford will be in charge of U.S. Sales, taking over for David Karnstedt who has resigned, as well as Market Development for Advertisers, Small Business, and Yahoo! HotJobs. Bradford most recently work for advertising agency Spot Runner, she had previously be in the corporate vice president of Global Sales and Marketing and chief media revenue officer for Microsoft’s digital advertising network.
Source: Yahoo Press Release
Google CEO Says Yahoo Partnership On Track To Start in Early October
In an interview with Bloomberg Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that Google search advertising partnership with Yahoo! is preceding to start in early October. He also said that regulators have so far “not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us.” The partnership is currently under review by U.S. state and federal regulators, as well as Canadian regulators.
Yahoo Launches Updated Site Explorer
The Yahoo! Search Blog today announced the release of an update of Site Explorer, it’s service similar to Google’s and MSN/Live Search’s Webmaster Tools. The update brings a new interface to accommodate unspecified future feature roll outs. The number rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting was increased from 3 to 10 as part of the update. The new version can be reached at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new, and will be made the default version soon.
July U.S. Search Share Results
Nielsen Online today released it rankings of U.S. search share for July. Overall search grew 3 percent year over year to 8 billion searches. Google had year over year growth of 16 percent and received 60.2 percent of searches. Yahoo! had a year over year decline of 11 percent and received 17.4 percent of searches. Microsoft had a year over year decline of 10 percent and received 11.9 percent of searches.
Yahoo Expands Users Ability to Turn Off Targeted Ads
Yahoo will allow users to turn off targeted ads on it site beginning at the end of August, according to a post on the New York Times Bits Blog. Yahoo already allows users to turn off targeting for ads it serves other company’s websites. So far the option appears to have not been widely used, with only 75,000 users having visited the opt-out page according to Yahoo. Yahoo said that it could not estimate how many of those users had opted-out.
Categorization Technology Added to Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange
Yahoo has partnered with LucidMedia to add categorization technology to Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange according to an article by CNET News. Using LucidMedia’s Clicksense contextual advertising engine to categorize publisher’s advertising inventory into more than 60 vertical categories, such as automotive, finance, and sports. In as statement, Right Media’s general manager Bill Wise claimed that the “technology will significantly help increase the prospective yield of a publisher’s available inventory and improve an advertiser’s ability to contextually target ads to relevant content and categories through the Right Media Exchange.”
June U.S. Search Share Results
Nielsen Online released it rankings of U.S. search share for June on Friday. Overall search grew 6.3 percent year over year to 7.9 billion searches. Google had year over year growth of 19 percent and received 59 percent of searches. Yahoo! had a year over year decline of 12.4 percent and received 16.6 percent of searches. Microsoft had a year over year growth of 12.5 percent and received 14.1 percent of searches.
Google Increases Share of Search-Ad Revenue
Google increased it share of US search-ad revenue to 77.4 in the second quarter of 2008, up 2 percent from the year ago period, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier. From the year ago period, Yahoo dropped 2 percent to 17.8 percent and Microsoft stayed even at 4.8 percent. Google average cost per click increased 13.8 percent, Yahoo’s dropped 7.3 percent, and Microsoft’s increased 5.6 percent.
Source: CNET News
Congressional Hearings Held for Google-Yahoo Partnership
Yesterday, the U.S. House and Senate Judiciary committees held hearings into the Google-Yahoo partnership. The chief legal counsels for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft testified during the hearings. During the hearings members of congress expressed concern about effect of the partnership on competition and the amount personal data Google would have on individuals. The biggest moment in the hearings came when Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel Brad Smith claimed that during a meeting Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang: “Look, the search market today is basically a bipolar market. On one pole there’s Google, and on the other pole there is Yahoo and Microsoft both competing with Google. If we do this deal with Google, Yahoo will become part of Google’s pole. And Microsoft, he said, would not be strong enough in this market to remain a pole of its own.” Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan first refused to address the claim and later stated he had attending the meeting and recalled the conversation as being different.
Source: New York Times