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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America
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Microsoft and Yahoo!: Putting the Offer in Perspective
February 01, 2008
Addendum: There was an error on the properties chart below, percentages for the maps category were transcribed improperly.
This morning, as reported by CNN, Microsoft made an unsolicited $44.6 billion stock and cash bid for Yahoo!. To put this potential deal in perspective, we've assembled some Hitwise statistics on MSN, Yahoo! and Google.
If we combine the top properties for the three companies, the combined market share of visits (U.S.) for Microsoft and Yahoo! would be 15.6% of all Internet visits, with Google at 7.7% for the week ending January 26, 2008.
But if we consider only search volume, the picture is very different. For the four weeks in January 2008, Google accounted for 65.98% of all executed searches in the U.S., while combining executed searches for Yahoo! Search and MSN Search would amount to 27.84% of executed searches for the same time period.
While the deal would have limited impact on Google's continued dominance of search, the combined content of Yahoo! and MSN properties yields an impressive list of top sites by industry category. In the table below, we've listed where Google, Yahoo! and MSN properties appear within the top five positions by industry category for U.S. Internet visits for the week ending January 26, 2008.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 12:47 PM
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Comments
Beg to differ. It's about SOCIAL GRAPHS. Hotmail and YMail together account for 84% of webmail users. Tack on even a stupid social network over that kind of userbase and you are in for some serious network effects. Then, the people in the network start inviting the people outside it. Who then sign up for some flavor of M$ domination once inside.
Yahoo hasn't figured out how to monetize its social graphs in email and everything else. But it's the biggest one, right? So Microsoft might have figured out a good way to monetize a social graph, and is now buying a really big one cheap. Like buying millions of souls for about $666 apiece.
Posted by Jef Wallace | February 3, 2008 06:09 AM
Very interesting, but your category list doesn't contain social networking sites such as Orkut and video sites such as YouTube. I'm guessing the results might be fairly different if you were to add these.
Posted by Mike | February 5, 2008 05:03 AM
Bill,
Terrific analysis.
The O'Reilly Radar guy focused on mail. The more interesting aspect might be IM since there is a network effect of IM systems that isn't there with mail systems.
Posted by Tom Stuart | February 5, 2008 06:55 PM
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See where you're coming from, but...
I have, for example, a Yahoo!, Live Mail and a Gmail account. Merging Live and Yahoo! could actually be a net loss to Microsoft/Yahoo! Plus, I like the Gmail best and it's the one I use more than the others!
It's obviously not as simple as adding together shares for comparable services and taking that as the merged share - there'll be a significant drop out when two similar MS and Yahoo! properties come together.
Personally, I think Google's laughing...
Posted by Mark | February 1, 2008 02:34 PM