When I fired off the previous post last night, I was essentially unimpressed with the launch of the new paid search (e.g. where advertisers pay for placement in the search returns). I mean Yahoo! bought Overture some time ago, and they were the very first paid search player of any magnitude. Basically, Y! has offered paid search in the US for a very long time (and in French in Canada) so while this new platform (codename: Panama) offers a much more Googly targeting and analytics platform, for the most part I was sorta "ho-hum, it's about bloody time."

But then, I started thinking more about what this means for search marketing in Canada, as a category. And in that context, this move, and the arrival of msn AdCenter, are tremendously significant.

When Orbitz launched in the US, we at Expedia were really nervous about it, as you can imagine. But what actually happened was that their arrival and subsequent spend in advertising and product development actually grew the category in total - so, a bigger pie, growing faster, and more customers for all.

I think that's what will happen here in search as well. To date, the only game in town, really, was Google. So that means that the entire category was being pushed by what that one player was doing to promote it. Now, we will have x-times more salespeople, attention and effort being put against it which should mean more money will move to this channel *in total* and that this may start to become a more core part of an overall media plan.

Now, the fact that Google still represents something north of 80% of Canadian search volume certainly gives Y! and msn a challenge. But their entry should be good overall.

Congrats to Y! on this launch and a great event.

(Posted by blackberry)