Paid Search Battles Get Nasty

Miscellaneous

from the can't-advertise-here dept

It seems that paid search is getting a ton of interest these days, with the two big providers being Google and Yahoo. As competitors, though, the battle is starting to get a little nastier. Yahoo recently banned Shopping.com from advertising on their site, because the ads directed users to a page that included Google ads. Eventually, the two companies worked out an agreement to include some Yahoo ads as well. The article points out that this raises some questions about how companies will deal with being blocked from advertising on certain search engines if they do business with the other. To be honest, though, this policy from Yahoo seems shortsighted. It’s not as if they don’t get money from Shopping.com when people click through the ads – even if they then go on to click through more Google ads. Why should Yahoo care what the person does after they’ve clicked through the ad – so long as the ad results are relevant? Obviously, they want more advertising dollars (and getting another deal with a company is valuable), but this seems to be a case where the company was doing more to take business away from a competitor than make business better for themselves.