Yahoo! and Microsoft continue their game of chess concerning Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover proposal of Yahoo! on January 31 2008. News came out of Yahoo! yesterday that they are projecting to ‘roughly double operating cash flow over the next three years.’ This news was apparently presented to the Yahoo! board of directors back in December of ’07 a month or so prior to the Microsoft ‘offer.’
From Yahoo’s official Shareholder report.
They state numbers considerably larger than Wall Street projection.
"Yahoo! is positioned for accelerated financial growth." States Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang.
Let the games begin!
Who knows when this will all be over and in the meantime it won’t really make that much of a difference for those that are running PPC. Many people fear putting money into Yahoo!’s and MSN ad platforms and this will only continue until this one has been played out. One thing we do know is that competition is good and if MSN needs Yahoo! to compete with Google we’re all for it, provided that they continue to offer services to help grow our businesses.
What’s Next for Search Engines and You?
For the smaller businesses out there wanting to run Pay-Per-Click and are not sure where to spend your money look to Marketshare for your answer until this chapter is over. Google still has an 80% marketshare of all search engines.
For more on who is who in the Search Engine world check out this post on Meta Tags and Search
The Big Three and How They Are Doing
Below are screenshots of how Yahoo!, MSN and Google have been doing in the stock market the past 6 months.
MSN(MSFT) went up but have come back down to just above where they were six months ago.
Yahoo!(YHOO) stock was nosediving until the takeover news where it spiked.
Google(GOOG) on the other hand continues a downward trend since the beginning of ’08.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com