For years now I have been expecting a viable AdSense competitor, from Microsoft, Yahoo, or a then yet unknown startup. By viable competitor, I mean publishers (like myself) could easily switch to the competitor and expect to make at least as much money on average. Yet the years go by, and there is nothing appealing to try out. I just don't get it...
Google's latest 10-K says their AdSense type products still account for 34% of their advertising revenue, of which advertising revenue is 99% of their total revenue (search for "Google Network web sites as % of advertising revenues"). You would think that if you were Microsoft or Yahoo and you
wanted to compete with to Google for the long-term, then you would start trying to grab away this
ever expanding AdSense revenue.
I've heard rumblings about Microsoft's, Yahoo's, Ask's
and others' attempts. However, to date there has been apparently no viability according to my above definition.
I appreciate that Google probably has a larger advertising base. However, Microsoft and Yahoo seem to both have the same order of magnitude of traffic across their sites, which should in theory translate into the capability of getting the same order of magnitude of advertising dollars.
Additionally, Google keeps a lot of the money from AdSense (in a rather opaque way IMHO). A competitor (Microsoft especially) could potentially subsidize the platform for a long time in order to help get publishers to switch.
So...
- Why the interminable delay?
- Will a combined Microsoft/Yahoo deliver something better?
- Am I just wrong and there actually is a viable AdSense competitor out there today (because I'm willing to try it right now)?
- Is it the fact that the big deals totally swamp out the small publishers and they are therefore somehow a waste of time?
- Is the coding and infrastructure of a contextual advertising platform really that hard (I really really doubt the answer to this is yes btw)?
