Leverage Marketing

Search Engine Market Shares

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Today our team took a look at the search engine market shares for the past year.  We came across two articles on the topic:

One that focuses on the re-branding of MSN, Yahoo, and AOL and what they seek to accomplish,

and the other depicts the most recent market shares for all search engines.

The first article takes a look at the new re-branding efforts of MSN, Yahoo, and AOL.  All stemmed from the newest campaign of Yahoo.  Collectively these three search engines are to spend about $200 million plus to revamp their old brands and enter new markets.  These three are not looking into creating something as much as repositioning themselves and re-establishing their search engines within their consideration set. Here is a quick breakdown of what each search engine is known for and what they want to accomplish:

Yahoo:

Known for their display ad service, however; growth is gone.

Goal: defend their brand and expand into emerging markets.  They would like to increase both monthly users and time spent on the service.

MSN:

The new decision maker, and close competitor of Google.  They need to work on convincing the public and build the new brand.

Goal:  break people’s habit of using Google when searching the web.

AOL:

Known for its agency relationship and the biggest Global Ad Network.  Goal:  To redefine themselves as a digital media company and major content producer.  AOL was in our office last week and they are a great group of folks.  We wish them success with their contract renewal and hope they can do away with pesky Insertion Orders.

Ultimately Yahoo has been slipping in terms of market share and all are awaiting the results of the big push in advertising.  For now it may have worked for Bing as Bing increased search volume by 22% in the month over month. In August Bing managed to get 1.1 billion searches or 10% of market share, however; it’s growth was by far the fastest at 22%. Yahoo saw a drop in searches by 4% and holds 16% of the market share.  The new branding looks to come at a good time. Google continues to grow and AOL and Ask see some movement as well.

We will all still have to sit it out and wait until the Yahoo and MSN deal is in place and maybe then we will see a decrease in Google’s search market share.