Commentary
Implications Of Yahoo Microsoft Search Deal
- by Lee Vann , Columnist, October 8, 2009
The US Hispanic Search Market Before the Yahoo Microsoft Partnership
Just as Google dominates the global search market, Google currently controls the lion's share of the U.S. Hispanic search market. According to my not-so-scientific estimates (see below), Google controls close to 47% of the U.S. Hispanic search market. Not only is Google.com the most popular site among U.S. Hispanics, Google has also been very savvy in establishing partnerships with leading Hispanic publishers to power their search functions. These partnerships include, but are not limited, to AOL.com and AOL Latino, Fox Interactive Media (most notably MySpace), Univision.com, Terra.com, Batanga.com, Starmedia.com and Impremedia.
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I calculate that Yahoo currently holds about 27% of the US Hispanic search market. The majority of its U.S. Hispanic search volume comes from Yahoo.com (the second-most popular site among Hispanics) in addition to Yahoo en Español. From a partnership perspective, some deals of note include Yahoo's integration with Mexican media giant Televisa's web portal, EsMas.com, which is very popular among Mexican Americans, and also with Hispanic Digital Network's array of niche Hispanic websites.
Microsoft is in third place with 13% of the Hispanic search market thanks to the third-most popular site among Hispanics, MSN.com and MSN Latino. Microsoft also picks up Hispanic searches from it's partnership with Facebook which reaches close to 8 million U.S. Hispanics each month.
Ask.com rounds out the top four with 13% of the Hispanic search market.
The U.S. Hispanic Search Market After the Yahoo Microsoft Partnership
By teaming up, Yahoo and Microsoft will represent about 40% of the US Hispanic search market, becoming a formidable competitor to Google. Today, Hispanic online marketers typically allocate search budgets first to Google, then to Yahoo and finally to Microsoft if budgets permit. Tomorrow, I would not be surprised to see more money going to Bing to reach Hispanics online. That of course, assumes Yahoo and Microsoft can provide a good user experience for advertisers, value to consumers, and simply get along.
Not-So-Scientific Methodology Used in This Post
To compute the Hispanic search market estimates used in this post, I used Hispanic unique visitors data from May 2009 from comScore Media Metrix recently published in the 2009 Hispanic Fact Pack for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox, AOL, Ask and Facebook. For all others, I computed Hispanic unique visitors from data provided by Quantcast, if available.
Yeah, I think Hispanic marketers will not be so quick to jump into spending their hard-earned dollars right off the bat to this new partnership. We are going to first, wait and see, how efficient and creative this partnership turns up for the first couple of weeks, then if it shows to be fun, entertaining, and most important: delivers results for your buck. Then I will imagine Hispanic and non-hispanic publishers will rearrange their advertising budgets in the manner that was mentioned in this article.
Great Post!
Gracias,
Gabe
Thanks for your comment Gabriel, I agree with you, clearly they (Microsoft/YahoO!) have to prove that they can generate results, but in theory the partnership seems interesting from a market share perspective.