This is good for business environment. Competition always makes the market better for the consumers. Now google has to come up with new ideas to stay alive in the market. This will introduce more useful services to the users i.e. us!!! So I would say this is good news. How ever I'm still a big fan of Google. Now, want to see some more from Google.
Sure I'm feeling a difference. All my campaigns just stopped running a day ago; customer support had to submit a tech support ticket which I'm waiting on; meanwhile the support person said she'd gotten quite a few others calls like this in the last day or two.
Not happy at this point. Had much better conversions and costs at Yahoo and Bing is just not picking up the slack. Wish they would have done search by Bing and ads by Yahoo.
Great Merge I love them both. Bing it! Google is getting old and bing has so many more options. Love the commercials BING
...Before Yahoo-Bing will be able to really compete Google in paid search. For now it seems Microsoft and Yahoo are having a rough start, and I guess many new advertisers just flee and prefer focusing on AdWords - see http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/forums/t/66966.aspx There are many complaints, about issues like: 1. Drop in click/impression volumes - this is due to AdCenter's narrower matching approach. 2. Lack of support - it seems like Yahoo reps got most of the advertisers, but they aren't handling very well with neither the amount of calls nor the proper knowledge of AdCenter system/UI. 3. Lack of features - AdCenter is way behind AdWords, not even "eating their dust". Search Alliance execs and workers have a lot of work to do. My guess is that Microsoft will go for expanding its keyword matching algorithms, since they won't be able to restore the amount of pre-alliance impressions simply by expanding advertisers' keyword lists.
It seems to be a great move. I heard yahoo will start ad network campaign like Google adsense. May be this joint venture may trigger yahoo to start the Ad network by middle of this year.