Excellent article about the last 12 months with Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft

If you have read about the acquisitions last year of Double Click by Google and the ‘me-too’s’ by Yahoo and Microsoft as well as WPP then you know the just of this article, however that being said this article is about 3 ‘pages’ long and without becoming microscopic in detail it covers much of what isn’t being discussed on 90% of websites so that is why I recommend it.

Personally I would like to have had the time to write something like this myself but that isn’t going to happen so I point you to it and hope you find value from it.

The article looks like it is targeted (my opinion) at senior managers and marketing executives.

NowPublic.com: Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Facebook: The Epic Battle of ‘Long-Tail Marketing’

A couple quotes for the uncommitted of you.

“….Microsoft threw out $240 million for a 1.6% stake, thereby valuing Facebook at $15 billion, it took a while for the so-called experts to in fact ‘get it’. Not only did this keep Facebook out of the hands of Google, but more importantly, had Google swallowed up Facebook, it would have changed the dynamics of competition between Microsoft and Google so heavily in favor of Google that it could have forced Microsoft to accept defeat in search engine marketing sometime down the road.”

“The significance of Google’s acquisition lies in their dominant market share of search traffic. By tracking the user through his or her I.P. address, Google is cataloging a mammoth database of user behavior.”

For example, imagine you have searched for a specific bottle of wine from a shopping web site in the past couple of weeks, and were now on your favorite news site reading an article about foreign affairs. At the end of your article, you might see an ad from a wine merchant suggesting you take a look at their inventory and pricing. To go one step further in our example, the merchant that is serving you the ad has agreed to pay the advertising network a generous fee if that user clicks through and ends up purchasing a product.