Iain MacAulay
Overture have just announced the signing of a two year deal with Lycos Europe to display their top 5 listings on the first page of results of the directory. As of early next year they also plan to display their results on Lycos sites in Germany and France, in addition to the announcement that they plan to launch their own e-marketplace in France later this year.Overture, the leaders in the world of PPC, haven't had much to shout about over the last while with bad press and falling shares, plus the loss of major contracts to their nearest European rival, Espotting, who's own launch with Lycos in December for the French and German territories now looks in jeopardy. This leaves Espotting with their only exclusive UK partner being Yahoo UK, while Overture have made deals with AOL, MSN, and Freeserve. While both companies deal with the ask directory.
With the upsurge of the Google ad words campaign at the moment, and their winning the AOL US contract away from Overture, are we now going to start seeing the lucrative world of PPC go to war? The pressure is obviously starting to increase due to the inclusion of Google into the equation, so where do we go now?
According to Onestat.com the website analysis software provider, Google have now become by far the most popular search engine in the world. As of June 6th 2002 it has been reported that its global usage has risen to 51% far ahead of Yahoo at 20% and MSN at 8.4%.
All of which goes to show that Googles tactic of giving priority to search quality really pays off.
It's offering of relevant results means that users find what they are looking for faster and more often and this in turn makes them come back to search again and again.
With all these companies backed by heavy finance could it be possible that we are now going to see schoolyard antics start to invade PPC world? This would be a great shame, although lucrative to all parties involved, yet it is the user that is going to suffer at the end of the day and the possibility of these companies fighting over contracts is only going to put people off using them if every few months the directory that displays your listings is going to change.
One thing for sure is that PPC is not going to go away and we are starting to see some interesting developments. But how long before the pressure starts getting too much and we hear talk of buy out's being banded about?
