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Re:We Need Viable Search Engine Competition by AJ007 on Saturday January 04, 2014 @06:11PM (#7013412)
Both Yahoo & Microsoft did a really bad job for a really long time at simply providing a platform that is comfortable for advertisers to use.

I have run ad campaigns on Adwords continuously for 7+ years. Throughout that time I have run ad campaigns on Yahoo, now Microsoft Adcenter, on and off. The last I checked their ad platform was about where Adwords was in 2005.

Yahoo had some very reprehensible things on their platform. I had to shut off all of my campaigns because someone at their company was changing what my ads said without my permission. Besides being a legal issue for Yahoo at the time, it put me in a position of unlimited liability. Fortunately, I never witnessed that behavior after Microsoft took over. Yet, Microsoft's platform was just too difficult to get working.

That was probably $5 million + in missed advertising revenue from me, just a tiny advertiser. I can only imagine the billions of dollars of revenue Microsoft and Yahoo lost for failing to take seriously the search advertising marketplace.

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