Search Marketing Pumps Yahoo Earnings
Well, its the end of a quarter again and time to hear how much money all the big industry leaders have pulled in over the past 3 months. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask will all be spilling their guts on how much search marketing and advertising drove their profits through the roof one more time. It is almost predictable that we’ll hear the same stories we did last quarter, making us wish that there were more interesting stock holders earnings reports… like Looksmart getting dropped from NASDAQ!
But wait a second. This is Search Engine Marketing! You know.. Paid Search, SEO, Links, Text Ads, Paid Inclusion, Local Search, Maps, Portals, Blogs and Podcasts. This is a serious multi-billion dollar industry.
What’s even better than that is the grand-pappy of all paid search, Yahoo Search Marketing, is kicking royal behind when it comes to revenue generation and competing with Google. Yes, the Godfather of the paid link, Y!SM was pimping sponsored listings as GoTo.com long ago. Things have changed since those days of one cent clicks, but Bid Jamming is still alive and well and fueling the Yahoo Media Empire.
Yahoo beat Wall Street expectations this week with its third quarter results, posting a 47 percent increase in revenues at $1.33 billion. Yahoo said net revenue for the quarter ending September, excluding traffic acquisition costs was up 42 percent at $932 Million. Traffic acquisition costs are the revenues that Yahoo shares with hundreds of Yahoo’s advertising partners.
$932 Million in revenue from search advertising and partners and the Yahoo Publisher Network, their answer to Google AdSense, is not even up and running yet at full blast. Granted that Yahoo will see some fallout when MSN ADCenter goes 100% live, but the way things are rolling right now, and with YPN growing, that MSN revenue might not too well missed for long.
Aren’t you the same blogger who called Wisenut “Wingnut” and Zeal, “Zuel” in a post not long ago? Really Loran you are stretching a grudge a bit hard wouldn’t you say. In fairness it is a new management and they have made some very respectable deals with top level search and media companies.
Your blog is respected enough by the search engines to show up as an authority for news. Please respect that position by reporting with a sense of balance.
Mark, I am guilty of calling Wisenut “Wingnut” and Zeal “Zuel” in the past. There is no grudge against Looksmart here. I only mentioned them being dropped from NASDAQ as, yes, it is a bit different from the rest of the industry news that we read. We reported on the Looksmart story with balance and clarity about the intention of Looksmart to perform a ‘reverse stock split’, which would then raise the stock value above the $1 minimum, keeping Looksmart on the NASDAQ and in the public’s eye as it attempts to rebuild itself.
You have excelled yourself Loren. In spite of both Mark L and my posting yesterday of reasons enough why Looksmart will NOT be delisted, you have followed up with the “Looksmart getting dropped from the NASDAQ” story header today & have even provided a Link to it!! But Mark L must have ‘rocked your boat’ just a little for him to have recieved, not one, but TWO responses from you, and even for you to advise him of his misspelling of your name !!
< What’s even better than that is the grand-pappy of all paid search, Yahoo Search Marketing, is kicking royal behind when it comes to revenue generation and competing with Google >
Perhaps Google’s Q3 figures have brought you back down to earth ??
But, re; Looksmart ….. In relation to their chances of ‘getting dropped from the nasdaq’ following a ‘reverse split” is probably best summed up best by “Lookinsmart2002″ in his post elsewhere :
Further Q3/4 upside from:
- increased cpc due to vertical targetting
- increased cpc due to removal of fraudulant traffic
- incrementally increasing traffic due to new verticals
- increased Q3 traffic due to Google discovering nearly 300,000 findarticles pages of content surrounded by revenue generating ads
- Unannounced licensing deal with ASKJ (not in guidance)
- Unannounced licensing deal with ASKJ (not in guidance)
- Unannounced licensing deal with New York Times (not in guidance)
- 400 new web properties waiting in the wings. Already 500k users from the verticals. Each new vertical brings new traffic.
- LOOK traffic nearing half that of ASKJ & recently sold for $1.85bn
- LOOK further monetizing the traffic with their pending new contextual ad platform incrementally replacing Google ads on their 10 million content pages.
- 10 million content pages to increase incrementally as new publishers come on board
With LOOK’s current Market Cap ($77.42M) at only a little above cash value, this represents a good value investment at these levels IMO.
Loren, I always look forward to your “Fair & Balanced” news but perhaps just a touch of that, ‘old wounds heal slowly’ may apply?
Thank you for the explanation Loren. Perhaps I was a bit touchy and I apologize for being abrupt and for the childish misspell of your name.
I will say again this is a company on the move but has many hurdles to jump still. One of them is the impressions of the SEO/SEM community that LOOK is still the same old LOOK.
It is not.
I do look forward to your coverage on LookSmart in the future.
Here is one to keep your eye on. I predict About .com will have the Furl button embedded in their pages before long.
If you check the NYTimes TimesSelect, TimesFile feature you will see it already in play.
Disclaimer- not an employee nor am I affiliated in any way with the company!
In order for looksmart to have all these wonderful things, wouldn’t they actually need to invest some effort in the technology rather then just saying “these six magazines are about blah, so let’s make a vertical on it”. When people said “Vertical search is the next big thing”, they didn’t mean, if you create some piece of junk and call it vertical search everyone will flock to your website. In dave hills words, if that’s your take on it, you must be smoking really good crack. Furl? What about google? Don’t they have a save url feature? Cached pages? What about the way back machine? Furl is just something they bought for marketing. Exactly how many people are they hiring to run all those hundreds of “targetted verticals”?
http://aboutus.looksmart.com/p/aboutus/jobs/search/
LOL !!!
smuggler53 !!
I am sure Loran Baker will ‘dig” a little deeper and come up with some positives to say of an improved Looksmart in recent times!!
David Hills advised that they have over 40 odd improvements to their Search platform …. In fact, former Looksmart “chief” Peter Adams recently went as far as, to say on his blog:
“Looks like my old company managed to get get a licensing deal done. The ad platform that we spent the last three years building is really top notch (better than Overture and Google IMHO) and so is my old team. We just never could get enough high quality traffic….
Congrats guys.”
http://www.oncefuture.com/padams/weblog/
:)
Ross