May 06

Microsoft Buying Yahoo Would Be Bad For Us

2007 at 4:37am | by Dave

2comments

Jay and I are hoping that the Microsoft / Yahoo deal never materializes, or at least doesn’t materialize anytime soon. It makes perfect sense for Microsoft, as a step in the right direction to close the gap that Google has over them, but right now a lot of our monthly income is tied up in MSN rankings.

If Microsoft bought Yahoo, we have no idea what plan of action they would take. Worse case scenario would be adopting the Yahoo algorithm (we rank quite poorly on Yahoo) for MSN. In that scenario, we’d see a large chunk of our monthly revenue disappear.

Obviously the situation we are in is less than ideal, which is why we are branching out into several other fields and developing sites that will get solid rankings on other search engines. However, this takes time, and to a lesser degree -  money. This just drives home yet another lesson that rings true in online and offline business: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Thankfully, Jay has a good family business to run and I’ve built up a solid web hosting development company, so we wouldn’t be borked in the short term if this worst-case scenario ends up happening. We also have several ideas (like EasyByDesign) that I know will do quite well, over the long run.

Good Profits.

Posted in Misc

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2 Responses to “Microsoft Buying Yahoo Would Be Bad For Us”

  1. Staska Says:
    May 6th, 2007 at 5:33 pm

    C’mon guys. I must believe the last post was with tong in cheek ;)

    WTF. You are afraid of MSFT merging with YHOO? How old are you? 40? There’s two nobodies merging. MSFT …Yhoo. .. Yawn…. Maybe I should be afraid of Inktomi, Excite, Lycos or Alta Vista?

    There’s only one king in town at the moment. It’s GOOGLE. And it will stay that way for a couple of years. And it will be GOOGLE who will go down in a few years. Just like MSFT and Yhoo did ….

    Unless Ray Ozzie has another insight…

  2. Dave Says:
    May 7th, 2007 at 5:44 am

    I assure you it’s a valid concern for us. We have a lot of our adsense wealth (fortunately we have other holdings, but they only amount to 400 - 700 a month) is tied up in MSN rankings.

    If MSN merged with Yahoo and adopted Yahoo’s ranking scheme our rankings would disappear and so would most of the $1500+ a month we make on Adsense right now.

    I think it would be foolish not to be concerned about the MSN / Yahoo merger.

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