Google was recently the center of negative attention when it was brought to the publics’ attention that they did not have a link to their Privacy Policy readily available from their homepage. Yahoo! and MSN both implemented the policy on their respective homepages and in an attempt to ride the wave, Ask.com has recently added a link as well.

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Today’s New York Times discusses a declining online advertising industry and credits the economic downturn for the industries woes.  The article cites the following statistics:

• According to PubMatic, between the months of March and April prices paid to networks for online ads dropped 23 percent; and for larger publishers the decline was steeper at 52 percent.
• AOL’s display advertising declined by 18 percent, to $191 million.
• Internet ad revenue growth at The New York Times Company slowed to 16 percent in the most recent quarter from 20 percent a year earlier
• WebMD Health and Weather.com experienced shorter buying commitments from advertisers; a result of wanting to test ad products prior to prolonged commitments.

While banner investments on ad networks have declined, search engine marketing appeared unaffected.  Google’s revenue in the United States was up thirty percent from last year, while Microsoft’s and Yahoo!’s online revenue jumped 29 and 9 percent respectively.  A majority of search engine revenue comes from search advertising.

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On Saturday, Microsoft withdrew its bid to takeover Yahoo!.  CEO Steven Ballmer stated that the reason for Microsoft backing off from acquiring the company was the concern that Yahoo! would take action to make the company undesirable to Microsoft.  One concern in particular was Yahoo!’s partnership to test Google’s search ads on its own search results pages.

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Yahoo! again blocks Microsoft’s bid. The Internet media giant extended a deadline for nominating candidates to its board of directors, buying it needs more time to find a white knight to help it stave off Microsoft’s takeover bid, currently valued at $41.7 billion.

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Last week it was announced that Microsoft had made a bid to purchase Yahoo! at $44.6 billion. This is not the first attempt to make a bid by Microsoft. However, because of Yahoo’s depleting stock, the merger is looking more and more favorable now then it previously was. Analysts offer great expectations of this merger and weigh in on how it will affect the furture of search engines.  Our search experts also weigh in on this merger and provide their summations. (more…)

Microsoft has officially released a bid of $44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo.  The struggling Yahoo stated Friday that they would carefully and promptly review the Microsoft bid.  It is no surprise that Yahoo will consider the Microsoft bid as stock prices have fallen by 46% since October and shares have recently reached a four year low.   

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