A few days ago three big brands joined forces to try and salvage their online advertising businesses as AOL, Yahoo and MSN announced that they will be selling each other’s ad inventory. On the surface you might think wow this is a great move that makes allot of sense and should only serve to help all three of them.
Just a little bit of stat digging and you will come to find out that this is probably their last ditch effort to remain viable options when it comes to online advertising. Like I said when you do some digging on how Yahoo, AOL and MSN have been doing you will quickly find that since 2008 all three of them have been loosing market share.
Who is the main culprit of this switch in advertising business partners you may be wondering? Why it’s Google of course but what you may not know is that Google is not the biggest gainer in advertising dollars over the last three years. That distinction actually belongs to Facebook as they have seen their online display ad sales numbers increase by a factor of 5x in the same time frame. That is a huge increase in such a short period of time and it has to make you wonder where this business model will be in another three years.
What do you webfolk think about the latest merger between Yahoo, AOL and MSN? Are they simply delaying the inevitable or will they be able to gain some traction in the ultra competitive market of online ad space? Will Facebook really become the advertising giant of the web that they seem to be becoming and will they give Google a run for their money? Leave your ideas in the comments section down below and for those of you that are interested in where I got my info here is the link to the story on the WSJ site.
Kudos to you webfolk 
Dave
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