Google Continues Dominance, Yahoo! Falters
September was a good month for Google’s search share. It increased its share by 1% from August, hitting the 45.1% mark, according to comScore qSearch. Nielsen//NetRatings was even more optimistic, indicating that Google has a 50.0% share of the whole search pie, a 24% increase from the same time last year.
Yahoo! dropped 0.6% from August to 28.1% of the market in September, while Microsoft also dropped 0.6% from the previous month to 11.9%, according to numbers released by comScore. Nielsen//NetRatings pegs Yahoo! at 23.4% and Microsoft at 9.2% for September.
Ask increased its share by 0.3% from August to 5.8% of the market, while Time Warner’s AOL stood still at 5.6% of all online queries in September, according to comScore. Nielsen//NetRatings’ numbers indicate that AOL has 6.3% of the market, while Ask has 2.7%.
Google also had good news for investors concerning its bottom line. Net profits for the search giant jumped to $733 million for the third quarter, and revenue increased 70% to $2.6 billion. Of course, 99% of this revenue came from the company’s powerful online advertising business.
Yahoo! fared worse, revealing that it had realized a 38% drop in profits during the third quarter of this year, bringing the figure to $158.5 million. Revenue rose 19% to $1.58 billion during the same quarter.
Google currently claims about 23% of advertising revenues in the U.S. Yahoo! has a 19% share. Last year, both companies laid claim to 18% of these revenues. EMarketer expects Google to increase this share to 25% by the end of this year.
Yahoo! is hoping that the two recent acquisitions of online advertising companies AdInterax and Right Media, along with its impending release of a new advertising management system called “Panama” will change their downward course. “Panama” will not help the company’s financial status until the middle of 2007.
Terry Semel, Yahoo!’s CEO, says that the company will “get back to basics.”
His company has been a bystander as its rivals make big deals to help their advertising businesses. Yahoo! has courted social networking site Facebook, though a deal has not been realized yet. Company executives say that they do not feel pressure to make a big deal like the ones Google and Microsoft made with YouTube and MySpace, respectively.
Sources:
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1037
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061020/tc_afp/
usitadvertisecompany
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?
release_id=174667
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/
0,20867,20631267-36375,00.html
