Yahoo, eBay team up against Google
In a bid to challenge Google’s growing domination of the Internet, auctioneer eBay has joined forces with Google rival Yahoo. The alliance brings text-based advertising to eBay from Yahoo and eBay’s PayPal payment program to Yahoo.
“This is a real boost for Yahoo at a time when they really needed it,” says Allen Weiner, an analyst at research firm Gartner. “Yahoo is in a battle to the death with Google and Microsoft, and getting eBay’s base into the Yahoo network will make people look at Yahoo’s ad platform as a real plus.”
Weiner says PayPal represents 20 percent of eBay’s revenue. Expanding PayPal to the Yahoo network “is an interesting way for Yahoo to offer digital content for sale, like movies and TV shows, and offer its customers a really easy way to pay for it.”
Yahoo is the most visited Web site, with more than 100 million monthly visitors. But it has been losing market share in online searches to Google, which dominates the hot search advertising business - those little text ads that appear near search results. According to measurement firm comScore Media Metrix, Google’s search share rose 6.6 percent in April over the same time a year ago, while Yahoo’s fell 2.7 percent.
John Donahoe, president of eBay’s marketplace division, says eBay supports its network of sellers by advertising their wares elsewhere on the Web with a heavy use of search-based “keyword” advertising. In the past year, eBay’s purchases of keywords for use in search queries has gone from 1 million to 15 million keywords, he says.
•AK Steel Holding Corp., unable to reach a deal with locked out workers at its Middletown Works, said Thursday it will resolve one of the hot-button issues by forcing retirees from the plant to pick up a portion of their health insurance premiums.
The union that represents the plant’s workers said it would sue to block the plan.
•Millions of AOL users encountered delays sending and receiving e-mail Thursday as the company worked to identify and fix a software glitch.
AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said the company was investigating the cause of the problems, which began late in the morning.
He said millions of messages were stuck in a queue and all would eventually get delivered. But as technicians tried to fix the problem, he said, users faced difficulties accessing their accounts, particularly through AOL’s Web interfaces.