Can Yahoo survive the collapse of its advertising deal with Google?
Poor old Yahoo. Can nothing go right for this grizzled pioneer of the internet world? Its attempts to create bespoke content fit for the age of the internet have gone disastrously and expensively wrong. Huge investments and numerous acquisitions have done little to improve its standing in the web’s most lucrative money spinner: paid search advertising. Earlier this year, Yahoo founder and chief executive Jerry Yang and his company’s board rejected a juicy takeover bid from Microsoft. The software giant was prepared to pay $33 a share. These days its shares trade closer to $14. Hope evaporated When Yahoo’s bosses said no, they promised shareholders that an advertising alliance with Google would deliver bigger rewards. Now their hope to divert some of Google’s huge advertising income into their company’s pockets has evaporated. The deal failed simply because together Google and Yahoo would have dominated the markets in both display advertising (the big picture ads on web pages) and paid
