Yahoo!7’s YSM search business closes shop in Australia
Yahoo!7 has closed its Yahoo Search Marketing business in a move which sees a number of staff redundancies as the company movies its search inventory to the Google Ad platform in Australia.
The move by the Australian joint venture between Seven West Media and the US-based Yahoo, is a significant shift in the Australian search market, with advertisers no longer able to advertise on Yahoo’s search engine directly and instead obliged to go directly to Google.
A spokeswoman for Yahoo!7 said the company chose to go with Google after Mi9 launched Bing Ads in Australia without migrating advertisers from the YSM Panama platform, which Yahoo!7 uses. Globally Bing and Yahoo! have an advertising alliance in search however, in Australia it appears the two side have been unable to come to terms.
“We believe the decision by Microsoft to launch Bing without us is not in the best interest of the Australian search industry,” said a Yahoo!7 spokeswoman.
“Yahoo!7 can confirm that we are undertaking changes to evolve the Yahoo! Search Marketing business in Australia. In regards to the rollout of the Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance, unlike other markets globally, Microsoft made a decision to launch Bing in Australia without a managed migration of advertisers from the YSM Panama platform.
“As a result of this we have undertaken changes in our business which will see the majority of our search inventory transition to the Google Ad platform. This has led to a small number of redundancies representing less than 2% of our workforce. We will undertake a planned migration to the Google Ad platform over the next few weeks.”
Mi9 has declined to comment, however, the announcement has raised eyebrows within the Australian search market as it will mean less competition and the further strengthening of Google’s hand. Search engine Google already has around 87 per cent of the search market in Australia.
Yahoo!7’s announcement comes weeks after a $61.5m writedown in the book value of the digital publisher.
Nic Christensen
Finally I don’t have to use the Panama interface. That thing was about 4 years past its use by date.
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Yahoo use to have a good name for searches 20 years ago, but were swamped by Google algorithms and success. They never caught up
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I cant believe that Yahoo7 has turned off their advertising portal. yes it was outdated but I was getting quality traffic which converted. It will be sad to see it turned over the G.
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