How much will it cost Microsoft?

Microsoft may not be making any upfront payment to Yahoo, but it will be paying heavily on the back-end to make the transition to powering Yahoo’s search engine. During Wednesday’s call, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said there would be “several hundreds—a couple of hundreds of millions probably” of transition costs over the next two years. A slide made public—and later taken down—at the company’s …

Are Bing users twice as likely to click an ad than Google users?

Are people who search on Bing more commercial than Google searchers? According to a study by search-advertising network Chitika, visitors who arrive at sites from organic search results on Bing are 55 percent more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google.

Chitika looked at the clickthrough rates from 32 million ad impressions across its network of more than 50,000 …

Yahoo what are you thinking?

Last summer, Yahoo took the liberty of updating its standard terms of service to allow itself to modify paid search accounts as it sees fit, leaving the advertiser to accept full responsibility for Yahoo’s keyword updates, copy updates, and other campaign modifications.

As a good search marketing practice, Yahoo shouldn’t be touching these campaigns at all without the advertiser’s desire for assistance (in effect, the only choice under these terms is to accept the terms or lose your account access), and search advertisers running on the Yahoo master service terms should pay close attention.

Can’t we just all connect?

Facebook launched the much talked and blogged about Facebook Connect. This is yet another system that lets members use their login information to access other websites, see what “Friends” are doing, and broadcast actions to others. Simply put, connecting Facebook to other sites will inherently make those sites social. That in turn, should make those other destinations more attractive to advertisers as traffic volume will likely increase through social …