The story for Yahoo continues. What chapter of this book we’re on, I don’t know – I’ve lost track. When Yahoo and Microsoft inked the Search Alliance deal, Yahoo’s position as innovator in the world of PPC all but evaporated. Sure, Yahoo still had its premium display, but that was it.
Fast-forward to the present. Search Alliance is still intact. In fact, Yahoo found a way to contribute more to that partnership through its deal to become the default search engine within Mozilla Firefox. Through all of this, Yahoo has somewhat quietly been rolling out the Gemini platform. We’re more than 1.5 years into the Gemini experiment, and it has emerged as an intriguing channel that is a hybrid of mobile search PPC and native advertising.
You may be asking, “But John, Yahoo is locked into the Search Alliance! It can’t do its own PPC platform.” Yes, yes it can. Yahoo has new Web property in the form of smartphone and tablet apps that came about after the Search Alliance. This is where the mobile PPC portion of Gemini lives. Now there is a real third option for mobile PPC outside of AdWords and Bing Ads.
