Week 2

What happened to Yahoo?

I didn't know what a revenue loop was, but the article explained it really well.
It's hard to believe that the main source of revenue used to be from banner ads.
Interesting how they used to want search engines to be called portals.
Yahoo wanted to be called a "Media Company" and not a "Software Company". They may have an office of programming code and helpings users restart browsers, but because they made money through banner ads it was more a media company indeed. Because Yahoo tried to be a Media company and not a technology one, they kind of ended up being nothing.
Yahoo never had good programmers which caused their technology rep. to fall greatly and they just never recovered. It is cool how if you want to come out of a bad programming spiral you actually buy good programmers instead of hiring them. Like buying their startups.

Google

Google is buying the company DoubleClick which is an ad company.
According to a 2007 research statistic pop-up text based ads account for 40% of online ads.
Google is a very minor part of display ads, as opposed to the leading companies, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo.
Google is buying this program because they think it will help them overall as a company because of some of the knowledge that DoubleClick workers have.
This article was kind of interesting I thought. I didn't know anything about online ads and how they work until I read this article. It gave you a very brief and basic overview of the kind of thought and preparation that goes into online ads for buyers and sellers.


Both articles were pretty informative. I'm not sure which I liked better though. The Yahoo one is cool because it written by someone who worked for Yahoo, so it gives a story feel, while the Google one is just facts about why Google is doing what they are doing. Overall, both were pretty informative about the ad world and how different companies deal with it.