Yahoo Inc acquires Overture Services

• Jul. 14, 2003

Yahoo! Inc. is to acquire Overture Services, Inc. with a purchase price of approximately $1.63 billion. The combined assets of the two will make Yahoo! the largest global player in the search engine world today.

Yahoo! just recently purchased Inktomi, and Overture just recently acquired AltaVista and Alltheweb.com. With these latest acquisitions, Yahoo! is proving to be the leader in today’s search engine market.

The combined companies expect to be able to take advantage of a number of revenue synergies by expanding marketing opportunities on Yahoo!’s network through:

• expand Pay-for-Performance search faster and more cost effectively into vertical properties, such as shopping, travel, and yellow pages;
• integrate contextual advertising throughout Yahoo!’s network, including properties such as in sports, real estate and autos;
• leverage Overture’s efficient, scalable marketplace by offering its 88,000 advertisers, the majority of which are small- and medium-sized businesses, the ability to get online, sell online and promote online by purchasing a range of additional Yahoo! services such as Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Web Hosting. Yahoo! and Overture will be able to expand their combined products and services internationally to create a unique global marketplace. Immediate opportunities include Europe, Korea and Japan where both companies have a strong presence."

This will surely up the stakes for MSN now which is testing its own search engine spider. Before this deal, Google was MSN’s major concern, but now with Yahoo!’s latest acquisition, this will yet again raise the bar in the search engine world even higher.

The entire release can be seen at the following url:http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=OVER&script=410&layout=0&item_id=430830

Gerard Manning
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Marketingspecialists