A Week In Digital
10 year paid search anniversary
It’s 10 years this summer since paid search marketing launched in the UK. Personally I can’t believe that 10 years have passed this quickly. How well I remember the summer of 2000 when Espotting and GoTo were going head to head for European supremacy in a market worth, I guess, £6m a year. How times have changed!
The UK paid search market is now worth well in excess of £2 billion with Google dominating with a c90% market share and Yahoo! and Bing both languishing in Google’s wake.
If you go back to the summer of 2000 no-one except the geekiest of geeks would have heard of Google and Bing would have brought up associations of Bing Crosby, not an all singing and dancing newish search engine. Espotting and GoTo are of course no more. Astonishing how time flies and how things change.
Google and Yahoo! quarterly results
Both Google and Yahoo! announced their quarterly results in the past week and the releases both contain huge revenue numbers, certainly, compared to the year 2000.
Google reported revenues of $6.77 billion for the first quarter of 2010, an increase of 23% compared to the first quarter of 2009. The UK Revenues alone totalled $842 million, representing 13% of revenue.
Google makes more money from overseas countries (I refuse to use the term International!) than it does in the US and over time I am sure that the trend will exacerbate over time.
In contrast Yahoo! saw a pretty meagre 1% rise from 2009 with revenues a fraction under $1.6 billion. However, this was the first time in recent results where Yahoo! have shown a revenue rise and for the first time in a long time you sense that Yahoo! might be getting a bit of fight back. Just a bit. Think handbags at 10 paces rather than Millwall versus West Ham scale aggression.
But hidden after the numbers is a note that Google are hiring 800 people to further fuel their already staggering growth rate. Frankly I’m pretty scared by the thought of 800 more Googlers plotting world tech-geek domination. I am sure that there are no such recruiting plans emanating out of Yahoo! right now.
Google Places
As well as the numerical releases there were also product innovations – Google (re)launched Google Places within which was a service allowing SMEs to upload photos of their businesses on to Google Maps and Google.com for a monthly service fee of $25.
I love it. Just about every mid sized business that I have ever worked with would buy this service – and there are 100,000 active businesses on Google in the UK alone.
When you scale that across the globe its pretty clear why Google’s revenue is growing at 23% YoY and why they are winning the search engine war!
Also in the same week Yahoo! shut their self serve publisher programme – a move that strikes me as very sad – AdSense looks like it has a virtual open playing field with very little competition.
