Information War Continues: Yahoo Launches a Site to Explain Google Advertising Deal

Sure, Yahoo-Google advertising deal to put Google ads right in search results pages on Yahoo Search has been one of the most discussed topics lately. Anti-trust authorities both in the US and Europe are investigating the deal to determine if it will damage competitive environment both in the online advertising industry (where two ad networks will start to cooperate instead of competing) and in search since for Yahoo it will be more and more difficult to compete with its own partner helping to generate a good portion of the company’s revenue. Both Yahoo and Google have already claimed that they will not wait with the agreement implementation any longer after the 11^th of October - the deadline in the contract between Google and Yahoo - if the regulators fail to announce their opinions on the deal.

Another player on the scene is obviously Microsoft as one of the most important goals of the deal itself is to help Yahoo avoid acquisition by Microsoft: obviously, if Yahoo has a healthy revenue stream, it will be easier for the company to resist Microsoft acquisition attempts. As an active player Microsoft has not kept silence over the agreement and voiced its own opinion in quite a number of press releases that are all collected in a dedicated section of the press site.

Today Yahoo has announced a very similar move of its own: launching a special website to make its own opinion on the deal clear to everyone who would be willing to listen. Yahoo claims that the goal for the site is to help everyone interested sift through the facts about the deal and understand the truth - or at least the truth as viewed in the Yahoo headquarters.

We hope the information archived on this site will help visitors understand why the agreement with Google will make Yahoo! a stronger competitor in online advertising and will benefit advertisers, publishers and end users.

The website contains quite a broad range of information about the agreement - overview, documents to prove benefits to Yahoo itself and advertisers, various regulatory materials (mainly Yahoo testimonials), FAQ section and a section to highlight a few favorable articles in notable media outlets. In general the website looks rather informative and terribly one-sided - but that’s obviously to be expected. So having the Microsoft’s site opened in the next browser tab will be a good idea if you want to get to learn what both sides think of the issue.

It will be interesting to watch what other measures Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft come up with now that only a little over a week is left until the deadline announced by Google and Yahoo in the advertising agreement but one thing is clear - neither party will keep silence in the coming 10 days.