Yahoo Will Continue to Serve Gemini Ads on Its platform
Yahoo and Microsoft Amend Their Relationship to Challenge Google (Part 2 of 3)
Yahoo believes the amendment to its agreement with Microsoft will allow it to serve its advertisers better
In the previous part of this series, we discussed the amendments of Yahoo’s (YHOO) search partnership with Microsoft (MSFT). We discussed how Yahoo should have more flexibility to show its own search results and ads. However, another change will be that Microsoft will take over the responsibility of selling ads on the Bing platform while Yahoo will continue to sell Gemini ads on its own platform.
Yahoo believes that this change will help both Microsoft and Yahoo to better integrate their respective sales teams with their engineering teams. This way, both companies can serve their advertisers better. This move should allow Yahoo to focus its resources completely on its own ad platform, Gemini.
Through Gemini, Yahoo is trying to gain share in the lucrative mobile search market
Yahoo Gemini is a marketplace that combines mobile search and native advertising, helping advertisers manage and optimize their ads. Yahoo has claimed that Gemini’s performance has exceeded the company’s expectations. In 4Q14, Gemini generated $106 million of revenue, which marked sequential growth of 32% from 3Q14. This growth was driven by improvement in targeting ads to users.
Through Gemini, Yahoo is also trying to gain share in the lucrative mobile search market. However, Google (GOOG)(GOOGL) completely dominates this market currently. Google commands an 87% share of the US mobile search market, according to StatCounter. You can see this dominance in the above chart. Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing are two smaller players in this market. They have shares in the single digits.
To gain a diversified exposure to Google, you could invest in the Technology SPDR (XLK). XLK invests 3.8% of its holdings in Google.
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