Online Marketing News Archive

Google’s $3.1bn acquisition of online advertising group DoubleClick has finally gone through, having been approved by the European Union.
The deal was first announced in April 2007, but it has now taken almost a year for the merger to pass the scrutiny of the regulatory bodies.
The US Federal Trade Commission approved the deal three months ago, … Read full article>

Google has announced that it will start taking page load times into account when it assesses Quality Score.
Quality score is used by the search engine which influences a particular ad’s position on the Google network, as well as minimum bids for keywords.
Other factors already taken into account are keyword relevance, the historical clickthrough rates of … Read full article>

Yahoo is launching a new programme that will allow website owners to build plug-ins for Yahoo Search that will enhance their listings in the search results pages.
Users of Yahoo Search will then have the option of switching on these enhanced listings, and will see these results when the publisher’s site comes up on a search.
These … Read full article>

January’s search engine market share figures have just been released by comScore, and Google remains the clear market leader in the US.
Overall, 10.5bn searches were conducted on the major search engines in January, an increase of 8.9% compared with December.
Google remains the clear leader, with users conducting 6.1bn searches with the company, while its search … Read full article>

Google has expanded its online video advertising program beyond YouTube, with the AdSense video ads now available in beta across all of the company’s content network sites.
The video version of AdSense allows advertisers to buy text ads which run along the bottom 20% of the screen when videos are playing. This is supposed to be … Read full article>

Microsoft will not be increasing its bid for Yahoo beyond the $41.7bn offer that is currently on the table, according to Chairman Bill Gates.
He said that Microsoft’s offer was a fair one, and that Yahoo’s board ‘should take a hard look at it’.
Gates also talked about the reasons for wanting to acquire Yahoo, saying that … Read full article>

Online ad spending continues to rise, with the IDC reporting that total US ad spending grew by almost 28% in the final quarter of 2007, compared with the same period in 2006. 
In the last three months of 2007, online ad revenue reached $7.3bn, while ad revenue for the full year was $25.5bn, 27% higher than … Read full article>

Search engine Yahoo has decided to reject Microsoft’s $44.6bn US dollar (£22.4bn) offer for the company, according to reports.
Microsoft made the takeover offer 10 days ago in a bid to challenge the dominance of internet search engine giant Google.
However, the Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo!’s board is ready to reject the $31 a share … Read full article>

Google has launched a new search engine for mobiles, with the company promising a faster service.
The service, which was launched in the US last year, is now available in the UK, Germany, Canada and France.
The mobile search service will combine normal web results with news, images and local listings.
According to Google:
“With the old search, you … Read full article>

Two of China’s biggest search engines, Baidu.com and Alibaba.com were ranked in the top 10 of the world’s most popular search sites, according to recent comScore stats.
Leading Chinese search engine Baidu, which recently moved into the Japanese market, has moved up to third, with 5.2% of worldwide searches, a total of £3.4bn search queries.
Alibaba.com, also … Read full article>