Excellent, excellent article on GigaOM from someone who clearly shares my mystification at why Yahoo, with its massive audience, can’t seem to mint money the way that Google does. Here’s where the confusion comes from; see how the little red line is above the little blue line? (The red line is Yahoo, in case you can’t tell… I seem not to be so smart at pasting simple images into blog posts.)
(And we’ll ignore the fact that both lines are the exact same shape, which seems to cast a little suspicion on Compete’s methodology.) Well, that means that Yahoo gets more traffic than Google. Only problem is, a lot of Google’s traffic is through their search pages and they are monetizing the heck out of it. Although their traffic is higher, Yahoo’s share of search is about one third of Google’s, meaning that rather than visiting Yahoo’s search page users are visiting one of Yahoo’s many content sites. So the natural solution is to focus monetization efforts on those content sites, right? Right?
Well, I know Jerry Yang reads my blog every night right before he has a glass of warm milk and goes to bed, so in the best interests of web users everywhere– Jerry, go read Sramana Mitra’s great suggestions about what you should do next.
Update: Look, everyone loves that GigaOM post… counting “everyone” as me and at least one other person, that is.