Yahoo! to acquire Six Apart? Naaah
[Nico](http://lumma.de/) just messages me about an article on the Internet Stock Blog entitled Yahoo to acquire Six Apart?. I do have to comment, partly because I feel it is highly unlikely and because there are some faults in the reasoning.
Their argument: _1\. Blogs are the next market for pay-per-click ads._
Not true, and Yahoo! knows that. Blogs, especially smaller ones have lots of repeat visitors that are not really perfect for pay per click marketing. There would be the same people over and over again, and on top of that, the opportunity for quasi-clickfraud would be high. I can easily click my ads 3 times a day and somebody else might too and at 50 impressions on an average blog per day, I’d say that’s a pretty high ratio of false clicks. On top of that, it’s not controllable enough. Even with clicks, a lot of the risk is still with the advertiser who wants to know he runs.
By the way, you can also monitor profitability per sale with CPM placements. It’s just that the prices are too high not that CPC gives you a new opportunity there. And the more money advertisers push into ads in CPC networks is because of the measurement and with that measurement comes a move from the marketing to the sales budget in terms of where the money comes from.
Another one of their points: _Overture followed, though it targeted large Web publishers (The Wall Street Journal) instead of automating the sign-up process to make it suitable for millions of small operators as Google did. (Perhaps Yahoo! underestimated the length of the long tail in Web publishing.)_
Overture does know the long tail very well. The problem is that the Overture architecture does not scale in that direction. They need a keyword that queries their engine to give back ads and if you want to run on thousands of blogs, with hundreds of pages, you can’t have 5000 people attaching keywords to each page anymore. That just doesn’t scale. You could allow the users to attach keywords themselves, allowing them to just increase their revenue per placement but that would go against the idea that is the founding principle of Overture. Targeted ads based on the choosing of the advertiser. Once they move away from search it is no longer the choosing of the advertiser but the choosing of Overture’s sales staff.
Another point: _Skeptical? Don’t be. TypePad has already integrated the Amazon.com associates program into its TypeLists, and announced in November that it was partnering with contextual ad provider Kanoodle. It’s only a matter of time before Google does the same with Blogger._
All TypePad did is allow me to give them my Amazon Associate ID and any book will be linked with that ID. Nothing special. Nothing really Integration there. But the point that it is possible to automatically give me some advertisement accounts is good and if Six Apart goes in a livetime value approach here allows companies like Kanoodle to integrate themselves into TypePad, then they can make a real kicker in money.
A very good point in relation to blogging platforms: _Yahoo! has… nothing._
Ok, there I give it to the article. It does have a point there :) Oh, and yes there is a solution to advertising in a blog world. :)
_2\. Web publishing will be a necessary component of an integrated set of Web-based personal tools._
_[…] MSN and Google will probably roll-out their own Web-based RSS-aggregators soon._
I presume one of them will buy Bloglines.
The Ubertool that follows is a nice idea and I think the company that will really succeed there is one that allows things to be integrated, which is where Yahoo! is doing well. Maybe they really do not need blogs, because they can integrate all the content for the users and the advertising dollars are there, not on the blogs themselves. Ok, there too but not only.
Another point: _Why won’t Yahoo! just build its own blogging platform? First, because the serious blogs with the most readers — and thus the greatest PPC ad potential — have already been built with Blogger, TypePad or Movable Type. And second, because Yahoo! is far behind Google and Microsoft, and acquiring Six Apart would vault it to the front._
I don’t think the serious blogs are already gone, but all in all, it is correct that it would potentially be good for Yahoo! You can just calculate a bit, saying that each of the users that Six Apart now has is worth an average of $100 (just an assumption via 2 years of fees or ads or something), and hence, Six Apart is worth $650 Million. Wohooo :)
Some minor things that would need further thought in the article but all in all, a very good read.