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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Feb. 9, 2008:

Archived blogs for the week of March 3, 2008

1416 - Mar. 6, 2008 - 5.19 PM EST

It's looking good for Google in the EU

According to various reports, some European regulators plan to accept Google's takeover of DoubleClick without any conditions. This would reject complaints by Microsoft that Google's acquisition would hurt industry competition.

Google's approval in Europe would be a blow to Microsoft, which tries to compete in the almost $41 billion online advertising market. Microsoft complained to U.S. and EU officials that it may be excluded of the combined company's ad network.

European Union antitrust officials, who have been investigating the deal since September, plan to rule that the proposed acquisition may proceed without changes, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision isn't public yet. The ruling may come as early as next Tuesday.

Jonathan Todd, a commission spokesman, declined to comment, as did Microsoft spokesman Jesse Verstraete in Brussels. They said the EU must rule by April 2nd at the latest.

Last December, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved the acquisition without imposing asset sales or other similar conditions. The deal, announced last year, would be a windfall for Hellman & Friedman, the San Francisco-based private-equity firm that bought DoubleClick for $1.1 billion less than three years ago.

Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence said "the acquisition will ultimately go through. However, Google doesn't even compete with DoubleClick. Acquiring it is simply for strategic reasons."

Microsoft trails Google in Internet search services. It said last April that Google's planned acquisition would give its rival more than 80 percent of the market for ads displayed on third-party Web sites.

The Redmond software giant plans to make its own acquisition in the market, with a $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. That offer, announced on Feb. 1, hasn't been accepted by Yahoo's board as of yet. Microsoft bought DoubleClick rival AQuantive for $6 billion in 2007.

Overall, Google still dominates the Internet search segment with a 58.5 percent market share. Microsoft has less than 10 percent, while Yahoo has a little over 22 percent, according to January data from Reston, Virginia-based research firm ComScore.

Google spokesman Ben Novick said "this whole thing is still an ongoing investigation more or less, but we don't believe the acquisition raises any competition concerns. We sure hope the EC will come to the same conclusions as the FTC." Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

1415 - Mar. 2, 2008 - 4.32 PM EST

Is PPC slowing down?

Recent numbers from comScore suggest Pay-per-Click may be slowing down. Of course these cover just a short period of time, so this certainly dosen't mean a new trend is forming. However, comScore's research is interesting and gives a good idea how Google and Yahoo battle it out.

On average, clicks on ads placed on Google didn't change much from January of last year to January of this year, according to the latest numbers from comScore. In fact, on average, clicks were actually down about 12 percent from the last three months of last year.

So does all of this suggest that Google's revenues have started to flatten out? In comparison, overall clicks on Yahoo ads also fell about 3 percent from the fourth quarter, but it was Google that was the most affected, and we won't even start talking of Google's close to 30 percent stock slide in the last few months...

I personally think that unless there's a problem with comScore's data (which is highly unlikely), the most probable scenario is that Internet advertisers are simply bidding on fewer keywords.

Seperately, Hitwise suggests that the percentage of traffic going from Google to retail shopping sites is actually increasing. Since the bulk of paid search advertising is shopping-related, the Hitwise data gives a far different picture than the comScore data.

Also, let's not forget that Google recently changed its technology to reduce accidental clicks, which could reduce the number of paid clicks, but could also make those clicks more valuable to marketers in the long run.

"An economic slowdown would likely mean less online shopping for consumers, and therefore fewer clicks on the ads that direct them to retail sites," said eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman.

However, Hallerman warns that Web marketers should not overreact to the comScore data. "You typically need multiple data sources to get a clear picture. Even if the comScore data is perfectly accurate, one month sure isn't enough to view any kind of meaningful trend," said Hallerman. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

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