Search Wars About to Begin
emarketer.comSurely that should be continue or heat up or have they been merely playing till now? "
"eMarketer's new Portal Update: 2005 report previews the coming fight between AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and Google for supremacy in the multi-billion dollar paid-search advertising market"
Online advertising is booming while broadband is finally becoming the main mode of access in the US with providers fighting to get the eyeballs...
The report summary points out the following trends:
"Search Google was the first off with a desktop search product, but all the major portals and search engines will launch their own desktop search product by 2005. In addition to desktop search, look out for personalized search tools, video and multimedia search, local search and mobile search services.
Internet protocol television (IPTV) IPTV has been successfully launched in a number of European and Asian countries, and 2005 will see launches in North America. Microsoft has already cut a deal with broadband access provider SBC to develop an IPTV service and the other portals are also likely to experiment with IPTV, too.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) VoIP grew significantly in the US in 2004, but 2005 portals will begin to offer branded VoIP products of their own. AOL Canada has already launched a VoIP product and a US launch should follow shortly.
Movies and Video-on-Demand (VOD) In the long term, movies — like music — will be primarily delivered via the Internet. With broadband households outnumbering dial-up households, the portals will find it is the right time to experiment with IP movie services. They will either build their own services or partner with established players such as NetFlix, Blockbuster, CinemaNow and MovieLink.
Rich Media Advertising Paid search advertising took the lion's share of online ad spending in 2004, but eMarketer forecasts rich media advertising will grow more quickly than paid search in 2005. The barriers to rich media advertising such as bandwidth constraints and ad formats are falling. Furthermore, in late 2004 Yahoo! launched a specific video search product (in beta) to compliment its other search services. This and other similar services are likely to drive multimedia usage and in turn rich media advertising opportunities.
China and India Three large portals are developing in another part of the world. Sina, Sohu and Netease are the Yahoo!, MSN and AOL of China. Yahoo!, MSN and Google already have a significant presence in China, but 2005 will see the US portals muscle in on the local Chinese market with additional partnerships and acquisitions. China will contain the largest number of Internet users in only a few years and 90% will have broadband. The portals will want a piece of that action. India has been slower to develop its Internet market than China, but the future growth prospects in that country are almost equally as great."
posted by Jen @ 4:24 PM
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