Search Engine Advertising Platform Wars

Yahoo's out with a new sponsored search marketing platform. Google continues to make incremental changes and tool innovations to its existing platform. Microsoft dropped Overture (which became Yahoo! Search Marketing) a few months ago and now offers its own advertising platform, AdCenter. Who's going to win? Search engine advertisers, I hope. Who's going to lose? I think Microsoft. Look at the latest search engine market share results (pdf from Nielsen//NetRatings):

1. Google Search 50.0%
2. Yahoo! Search 23.4%
3. MSN/Windows Live Search 9.2%

I suspect most advertisers will devote their PPC ad budgets to Google and Yahoo. Advertisers need to display their ads where the market is. Who has time to manage three complicated online advertising platforms? Plus, it's possible to rank well on MSN with standard SEO techniques. Lately, I've been spending the bulk of my time managing and tracking AdWords accounts, a little time overseeing Overture (still can't get used to calling it Yahoo! Search Marketing) accounts and then a dash of SEO here and there. I wonder how other search engine marketers and individual advertisers divide their time these days...

Technorati tags: search engine advertising, yahoo search marketing, microsoft adcenter, google adwords, msn, ppc ads