Soon, Yahoo Search Marketing’s contract with MSN will be up (by month’s end).

MSN’s U.S. search distribution agreement with Yahoo! Search Marketing ends this month, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search listings will no longer appear in MSN’s U.S. search results. Although we regret the loss of MSN as a distribution partner, it was not unexpected, and we do not anticipate a significant change in the total amount of traffic to our advertisers as a result.

We expect that MSN will continue to display Yahoo! Search Marketing Content Match listings in the U.S., and Sponsored Search listings in non-U.S. markets, beyond June 2006.

That means US search results will most likely use MSN Adcenter ads since. Content match may soon follow (my guess is that it is easy to figure out context on a search result…just use the terms typed in and match them against the terms advertisers paid for). Extracting a short and the most relevant context of a web page may require more time and collaboration with their search engine.

We’ll soon find out just how big the impact is by checking with the Overture/YSM Keyword Selector Tool which shows you how many searches for a key term happened.

We are moving in the direction of fragmentation by having multiple advertising channels, not to mention multiple advertising models such as pay-per-click, cost-per-acquisition, cost-per-call, cost-per-view or click after video (i.e. those Google video ads or Revver).

This fragmentation should lead to:

  • More specialties within marketing/advertising.
  • More services offering a singular solution that will manage campaigns with all large channels (i.e. SEM companies)–but more of the new ones should have better technical solutions than the abundance of manual ones we see now
  • More work for SEOs and SEMs to have to research the number of searches for keywords
  • More options for publishers and advertisers which may mean higher payouts to publishers (either through higher CPC or lower CPC with higher volumes of transactions) will either squeeze margins for these channels, some of which will be passed along to the advertisers…but of course the market will help define this on its own
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