Google vs. Yahoo! (continued)

Richard Siklos has a longish piece on Yahoo! in today's New York Times Sunday Business Section.

Nothing new in there, but it's a good historical review of the last five years and gives a good summary of where Yahoo! is headed.  This is my favorite quote:

Still, Mr. Semel contends that Yahoo's ability to blend brand and search advertising will set it apart as the Web continues its swift evolution.

It strikes me that Yahoo! is farther ahead of Google in brand advertising than Google is ahead of Yahoo! in search.  The "turnkey" approach that Yahoo! offers advertisers seems like a very solid strategy.

Of course time will tell.

In the meantime, I have created my own head to head competition between the two in the Contextual Advertising section on the right sidebar of this blog.  I am now running both Yahoo Publisher Network and Google Adsense.

So far, its pretty clear that Google's ads are more contextually relevant. But that's not the only thing that matters.  Once I get a week or two under my belt, I'll let you all know which one is making me more money.

Comments

[Marcin]

Hi,

Two things.
1) To compare yahoo and google ads, I believe you should rotate them in the same spot. Otherwise their position might affect your results.
2) I believe it is against adsense TOS to serve other text ads on the same page...

Marcin

[Pete Cashmore]

I think Marcin is right - it's against the Adsense TOS to run Google ads alongside other contextual ads. This is why services like Chitika offer non-contextual ads - you are free to run them next to Adsense.

[mdogs]

Yahoo might be making more money now but in the long run who is going to make money. That is the deal here...

P/E tells the story, investors are bullish on google not without a reason.

We know Yahoo's laziness. One good example is their BETA MAIL !! How long does one need to release a Ajax based mail ? They have announced this more than 6 months back and still scratching their heads without a rollout. Few ppl got beta invites thats all has happened there.

Brad, pls dont bring your personal prejudices (or is this to do with the delicios buy out ;-)) into this YAHOO vs GOOGLE dialog. Everybody knows Google is on the rise and is more innovative and swifter than yahoo.

[Erik]

Google has yet to prove they can build a complex application well. Video store is not a good start. The complex UI on their ad control systems is poor.

Google does search extremely well. Google monetizes search spectacularly. But moving forward they have yet to prove they can build anything more complicated than a search box interface very well.

-Erik (full disclosure requires me to say I was a Yahoo! from 1997-2000)

[simon]

***Warning Unrelated Comment*

Hi Fred,

Im never sure how to contact you,but i know you personally approve these comments. but id like to pass the 4 question questionarre on to you from my site

http://simondodson.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1138575333&archive=&start_from=&ucat=3&

It would be kewl if you could do it

Thanks
SImon

[fred]

mdogs:

first, its lame to post a comment and leave an email address like [email protected]

second, i am sorry if you are long goog at >90x eps

third, every single thing ever written on this blog are my personal prejudices.

don't come here and read my stuff if you don't want to read them.

[Otis Gospodnetic]

Fred: I agree with Marcin about rotating ads. I'm anxious to see your report! When do you think you'll post the results?

And yes, YPN + AdSense at the same time is against AdSense TOS.

[Markus]

Google just started beta testing branded ads... Yahoo makes the majority of its money from branded ads. Anyone want to make a guess on what is going to happen when google releases it to everyone? Yahoo has CPM's of $30+ i'm sure most adsense advertisers would LOVE to get $10/cpm.

[theCreator]

Google probably would fare better since the ads they serve tend to be more relevant than Yahoo's, based on my personal experience

[aaron wall]

Google has more advertiser depth and is more optimized for relevancy.

Yahoo! tries to optimize for earnings, and there targeting will probably blow unless you are in a high margin topic with many advertisers.

Also if you really want to test the earnings potential of your site you may want to shift your ad format and location.

The 160 wide by 600 long in the left column does amazingly well. Where your current ads are you probably won't get many clicks, in spite of your large traffic. Why? Because that is where ads are normally located. See the Google AdSense heatmap.
google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html#17954

You can use something like phpAdsNew to rotate the ads phpadsnew.com/

[Ed]

I hope neither will win. Thursday, I will make available a download that demonstrate the 'autosurfing' scam all these tech cats want to keep out of the media. This download will be widely distributed for the critical mass to understand how rife and lucrative the fraud with pay-per-click advertising program is.

The software is easy to create and show a browser automatically searching and detecting a pay-per-click link that it could click on without human intervention. This is the 'click fraud' that proves PPC is not viable but the tech media want to keep this quiet because they want Google/Yahoo to be a 'hero'....

I hope some lawyer with class action not only get the pay-per-click providers for not disclosing the fraud and deception, but also get the affiliates who are usually tech writers and bloggers that know the 'autosurf' scam but don't care small-medium advertising business are getting ripped off in the process...