Those old Yahoo-AOL rumors are persistent, if anything. Surfacing again are details related to a deal that could thwart a Microsoft takeover forever. But at the same time, it would seem damaging to an already heavily-scrutinized search ad deal with Google.
We haven’t done any content analysis to discover what TechCrunch’s rate of rumor accuracy is—it’s kind of like playing roulette, sometimes they hit, sometimes they don’t. At any rate, Mike Arrington is reporting that a merger deal between Yahoo and AOL could come as an October surprise.
If so, the Yahoo portal would be (even more) gargantuan in terms of market share, and the company would be directing 48 percent of the world’s email traffic and 39 percent of the world’s instant messaging. If Microsoft got weepy and fell in love again (strictly within this hypothetical string of events), buying up Yahoo (that $33 per share looking good now, Mr. Yang?) would place 90 percent of email and 95 percent of instant messaging square in Microsoft’s lap.
And Google could have a field day petitioning worldwide trustbusters to intervene. At the same time, if Yahoo buys AOL, you can add another three or four percent to Yahoo’s search share, which would be adding to Google’s share of ads served to the searching populace, already a big issue among antitrust watchdogs.
Because of all those potentially entangling alliances, I’m thinking an AOL merger wouldn’t be in Yahoo’s best interest. An October surprise? I’ll be, well, surprised, if so.
