Suppose that Steve Ballmer and Jerry Yang miraculously agreed on something: the sale of Yahoo’s search department. A new Hitwise report sorts through the pile of properties that would remain, and as it turns out, the leftovers look pretty tasty.
Yahoo Not A Search-Only Show
A breakdown shows that much more Yahoo-related traffic heads to Yahoo Mail and plain old Yahoo (37.47 percent and 30.62 percent, respectively) than to Yahoo Search (12.10 percent). So in terms of eyeballs, any company splitting things with Microsoft would still be getting quite a lot.
There is the question of whether people would visit Yahoo’s properties without nudges from its search engine, of course, but Heather Hopkins supplied statistics on that issue, too. “Most properties receive more traffic from Google than from Yahoo! Search,” she states.
“In particular, Yahoo! Answers received 49% of its US visits from Google last month, compared to 20% from Yahoo! Search,” according to Hopkins. “Flickr received 13% of visits from Google compared with 5% from Yahoo! Search. The exceptions are Yahoo! Image Search and Maps, likely because of Google’s shortcuts to its own properties in these verticals, and the Yahoo! account pages. Even Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo.com received more traffic from Google than Yahoo! Search.”
These conclusions lend a great deal of credence to the idea that a split acquisition could occur. Now we’ll just resume hoping that something – anything – will bring an end to this mess.
