Perhaps you don’t need any more explanations of the significance of Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo, but I don’t want to lose my media/tech blogger license, so here’s mine.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo is akin to newspaper industry consolidation over the last few years — combining business with solid cash flow to achieve some efficiencies and [...]

Every application needs to make assumptions about its users, and for some people those assumptions will inevitably be wrong. Why is it, though, that so many social networks and other social applications assume that all social web users are not yet old enough to drink?
That’s the first impression I got from Yahoo’s new social [...]

Kudos to Publicis Groupe and Digitas for imagining an all-digital advertising future, for planning to solve the deep structural problems of advertising 2.0, and for not sitting still while Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft take over the advertising industry.
The most provocative idea to emerge from the New York Times profile of Publicis/Digitas’ digital advertising strategy is [...]

Why should Google buy Yahoo? With the exception of search, Yahoo’s strengths map to Google’s weaknesses, almost precisely. Consider the following:

As speculation and chatter increases, the question of whether Google ends up buying Facebook is turning out to be one of the big questions of 2007. My bet is that there is already an offer on the table, and that Facebook is seriously considering it. I’m also willing to bet that Facebook will [...]

Yahoo has launched an advertising platform called SmartAds, which allows display ads to be customized “on the fly” based on a user’s behavioral profile, taking a significant step towards the long-promised but thus far poorly-delivered paradigm of total customization for online display ads.

The New York Times asks, “Should Yahoo stop trying to beat Google at its own game?” and VC Jim Breyer says, “They should take a hard look at the search business, and it may well be the right time to stop trying to out-Google Google.” Wow, that sounds awfully familiar — probably just a coincidence.
In [...]

In all the coverage of Terry Semel’s stepping down as Yahoo CEO to be replaced by founder Jerry Yang, there’s a standard reference to Yahoo’s failure to beat Google — and the implication that perhaps Yahoo can never beat Google. The main reason way Yahoo has lagged Google is that Yahoo has been trying to [...]

It’s clear now that the media and advertising industries, which thanks to Google and Web 2.0 now include the software industry, will be dominated by a new breed of company — the vertically integrated media and advertising company. Google’s AdWords created a new model by combining a media company — Google’s search results and its [...]

I saw one of Google’s “agency relationship managers” give a pitch to a top agency, where she gave the standard line that Google doesn’t want to be an ad agency. I didn’t believe it for a second. And neither does WPP, one of the top agency holding companies, which just announced the acquisition of 24/7 [...]

Perhaps there are good reasons why Microsoft should acquire Yahoo, but beating Google probably isn’t one of them. The reason is simple:
Microsoft and Yahoo have businesses that leverage the online network.
Google increasingly IS the network.

I’ve been thinking a lot about media brands and whether they still matter in the new media landscape. The more I think about, the more it seems that brands are the only thing that still matters in media. What’s changed is not the importance or the role of media brands, but rather what defines a [...]

Yahoo dumped a bucket of cold water on the (irrational?) exuberance over the torrid growth in online advertising, warning investors that their revenue for Q3 would come in at the low end of their forecast due to an unexpected slowdown in auto and financial services ads:
A Yahoo Inc. executive said Tuesday a slowdown in advertising [...]

The gloves came off on a click fraud panel at Search Engine Strategies this morning when Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety at Google, blindsided all of the panel members, including Yahoo, with the release of a study aiming to discredit third-party click fraud auditing (full report is here):
A rigorous technical analysis [...]

What does it say about an advertising format when an industry “council” has to be formed in order to arbitrate the problem of advertisers not knowing whether they are getting what they paid for? That’s what happened to both pay-per-click advertising and TV advertising this past week, and the similarities between these two ad councils [...]

Inform.com has wisely gotten out of the Web 2.0 news aggregator business and into the publisher services business. Erick Schonfeld at the Business 2.0 Blog has the scoop:
As readership declines for newspapers and online readership grows, every publisher faces the threat coming from the edge of the network. Sites like Google News, Yahoo News, [...]

Yahoo went live with it’s new homepage today, and when I went to check it out with my Firefox browser, this is what I found:

Yahoo clearly saw an opportunity with its tremendous homepage reach to leverage its strong portal brand to try to change users’ default searching habits. Interestingly, the pitch is not “use Yahoo [...]

At the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, search advertising is getting slammed for its inability to build brands — and rightly so:
Laura Desmond, chief executive of Mediavest USA, which advises clients such as P&G, Masterfoods and Kraft on buying and planning media, said: “Google is going to have to change its business model soon. Search alone [...]

In advertising, people aren’t people — they’re targets. Consumers “need” to see an ad, but they just don’t know it yet. Luckily, Yahoo’s new ad system knows:
Yahoo’s new ad system is designed to let marketers target prospective consumers not only by the search terms the people use, but also by their demographics, location and what [...]

Reading about Yahoo’s new search-advertising software code-named Project Panama, I can’t help wondering whether any other form of advertising can compete with search advertising’s projectable ROI and hyper-efficiency:

But as advertisers enter each bid, they will see an estimate of how many clicks they will receive each day. More important, a graph will show how many [...]

Yahoo launches a consumer tech site and the blogosphere is not impressed . Why — because they’re all a BUNCH OF GEEKS (with all due respect).
Here’s why I think Yahoo Tech is a serious threat to CNET:
1. “Advisor” Blogs — Sure they’re “hokey,” as Richard MacManus points out, but this is at least an attempt [...]

RSS sucks. I’m with Paul Kedrosky. Let the technodweebospehere rain fire and brimstone. I could add to Paul’s rant, but instead here’s a Really Simple three-step Solution (of course, the real first step is admitting that you have a problem):
1. Call it “subscribing”
Everyone understands subscribing. You’ve got your email newsletter subscriptions, your premium cable channel [...]