Yahoo CPM versus Google PPC

Paul Kedrosky says "Time spent per site favors Yahoo over Google" and concludes that "Yahoo has so much leverage in 2007. With the company so far out in front of Google in terms of time spent on Yahoo properties, it comes down to monetization -- Yahoo has the audience, it now has to do something with it. "

Paul makes his point with an interesting chart from Compete.com which shows MySpace with 11.9% of total time spent on the Internet, Yahoo with 8.5%, and Google with just 2.1%. I have the highest respect for Dr. Paul Kedrosky and I really enjoy reading his blog and watching him on TV. But, I must respectfully disagree with him on this one.

I wrote a story about this last month "Why Yahoo's Panama Project won't be enough" The basic premise was that Google gets 88% of its traffic from search result pages where they can sell targeted PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. Yahoo gets only 11% of its traffic from search.

Yahoo gets 33% of its page views on Yahoo Mail where at best you can sell low margin CPM ads. Another 32% is hits on the Yahoo home page...again, not targeted so all you can do is sell CPM banner ads. Take a look at this chart

Remember back in the Web 1.0 daze... Time on site, page views, stickiness, were the mantra. The problem is that stuff isn't targetable so they end up selling CPM banner ads at a very low price. Google burst onto the scene with highly targeted text ads that are sold on a PPC basis, and the ads are sold auction style to the highest bidder. That fundamental difference is what made Google into a money printing machine.

These two charts illustrate the dramatic difference between Yahoo and Google. It really has nothing to do with search engine technology. It is about the nature of the traffic and how it is monetized. That is why I say the Panama ad serving engine will not make that much difference to Yahoo's bottom line.

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Comments

[Louis Gray]

One big item missing from the above chart is Google Reader. I am now spending a tremendous amount of time in Google Reader, taking down about 11,000+ items a month (including yours). Yet, I think the "time per user" metric still favors Yahoo!. Yahoo! offers Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! News stories that I actually read, keeping me on the site. Yahoo! Sports is just about as good as ESPN now in getting me the data I want fast. Google, aside from Reader, is used for searches and news alerts - both very quick "on and off" visits.

[Dave]

nice post & analysis don... i tend to agree with your conclusions.

there's a chance if yahoo can figure out CPA-costed advertising before google does they could get a larger % of their traffic from highly targeted audiences, but if i were a betting man i wouldn't stake my life savings on that one.

yahoo won't disappear anytime soon, but they appear to be treading water more than swimming strong...

[Ewan]

Yahoo seem to be ignoring their customer database when it comes to the yahoo.com front page.

If i go visit www.yahoo.com now, I get the USA page with adverts for people in the USA (Netflix, loans, online degrees all unavailable to UK customers), along with baseball and basketball stories. It's such a trivial step to lookup that I'm based in the UK and so would be best sent to the UK homepage with UK stories and of course adverts that should be shown to UK readers.

To me this suggests the widely touted Yahoo knowledgebase of their customer habits either doesn't exist or is in such a bad state of organisation it's unusable for improving their customer experience. Either way, it doesn't bode well for Yahoo increasing their advertising revenues.

[Lloyd Budd]

When I say Compete.com chart what you describe was the first thing I thought of, and jokingly thought "it is the quality of the page view" like some sites like to claim "it is the quality of the click".

Though Yahoo is still very successful with forced ad views in its properties like mail and groups, whereas customers would not accept a similar practice if employed by Google.

[John]

The problem at Yahoo is not about anything element of this article. The problem at Yahoo is very basic. The need to "follow the money" to find the problem.

1) Ad revenue (compared to Google, to trends, and to market expectations) is down not because of less "eyeballs". It is down because the advertisers who are the ones paying the money are spending less money for the ads.
2) This ad revenue deficit is reflected in the market price investors are willing to keep or buy Yahoo stock.

Please "follow the money" and focus on the real issue. Yahoo spends too much time "following the pea" and needs to understand why advertisers are reducing their spending on yahoo ads. As an advertiser I can tell you that I dramatically reduced my spending because of all the fraudulent affiliates that Yahoo has signed up and their unwillingness to let me "opt out" of advertising with them.
I simply voted on Google by closing my pocketbook to Yahoo. I am unwilling to spend money on fraudlent clicks and Yahoo is unwilling to do anything about it. This very sad short run thinking is causing Yahoo to be a "dead company walking".

They can rearrange the deck chairs all they want be firing Semel but they need to understand why adversisers are moving their money to Google from Yahoo.