Google Leads in Search Monetization as Yahoo's Market Share Stabilizes

Business Wire, July 17, 2007

SearchIgnite and RBC Capital Markets jointly issue Q2 report evaluating performance & market share of the top engines

ATLANTA -- New research from SearchIgnite and RBC Capital Markets reveals that Google has surpassed both Yahoo and Microsoft in revenue earned per search in the second quarter of 2007, leading to Google's market share of 76% of the spending on the top three engines, even though Google only displays 60% of ad impressions.

SearchIgnite, a leading search and media management technology provider managing more than $200 million annually in paid search, teamed up with RBC Capital Markets, whose research arm methodically covers Google, Yahoo, and others in the Internet space, to uncover unique findings related to market share and revenue per search across the top engines. The companies jointly published a white paper today entitled "Market Share Trends within the Engines, and Their Impact on Brand Marketers," revealing these key findings:

* Search engine market share, defined as the percentage of media spend, has stabilized in 2007, as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have not been able to make significant gains.

* Google continues to garner a much larger percentage of media spend than its percentage of searches. In June 2007, Google received 76% of media spend while it received only 60% of searches across its network. In contrast, Yahoo earned 18.3% of media spend although it received 34% of searches across its network over the same time period.

* Google's revenue per search continues to increase due to its continual tweaking of quality score algorithms and minimum bid requirements. Google made a significant change in June regarding landing page relevancy to reduce spam in its listings. This benefited large brand marketers while having a detrimental effect on smaller advertisers.

* Large brand marketers continue to benefit from Yahoo's Panama platform, although their gains have stabilized.

This study tracked more than 14 billion impressions and 185 million clicks on Yahoo, Google, and MSN from January 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007 across more than 500 marketers, all of whom are clients of SearchIgnite directly or via its sister company 360i.

"Interestingly, the SearchIgnite data confirms that Google's late-May change to increase the weighting of landing page quality in the paid search ranking algorithm benefits large enterprise advertisers and makes it more difficult for affiliates and other smaller online advertisers," said Jordan Rohan, Managing Director and Internet analyst at RBC Capital Markets. "Furthermore, Yahoo's Panama-related market share gains now appear somewhat temporary."

"Panama has stabilized Yahoo's market share but so far has failed to give them the gains necessary to take them to the next level," said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite. "Google's second quarter algorithm change continued to propel its leadership in monetizing search for large brand marketers, surpassing Microsoft, who has historically been able to monetize search very well, albeit with fewer eyeballs."

This is the third in a series of quarterly reports that tracks results from Panama. Subsequent reports will start to reflect budgetary decisions that search marketers are making regarding their budget allocations across the major search engines, reflecting the longer term economic impact of the Panama release. This report is a follow up report to "Yahoo Panama: Early Returns" and "Yahoo Panama and the Broader Search Landscape: A Q1 2007 Competitive Review," studies produced by SearchIgnite and RBC Capital Markets which can be found at http://www.searchignite.com.

About SearchIgnite

SearchIgnite is a leading search bid management and portfolio optimization technology that uses complex algorithms to help marketers and advertising agencies achieve their ROI metrics across all the major engines. With comprehensive proprietary campaign measurement and optimization tools, SearchIgnite provides advertising agencies and sophisticated marketers with a single dashboard to manage multiple simultaneous campaigns in real time. Using a portfolio approach, SearchIgnite provides the tools to maximize campaign effectiveness across multiple search engines based on each client's business objectives. SearchIgnite is a trusted advisor to all the major engines, and sits on Google, Yahoo! and MSN's prominent Technology Councils. SearchIgnite is part of Innovation Interactive, a search-centric digital marketing services company. For more information on SearchIgnite, please visit www.searchignite.com.

About RBC

RBC Capital Markets is the corporate and investment banking arm of RBC and is active globally in debt origination, sales and trading, foreign exchange, infrastructure finance, structured products, metals and mining and energy. Its North American equity underwriting, sales, trading and research business dominates the Canadian market and supports a significant and growing franchise in the U.S. middle market. Bloomberg ranks the firm as one of the Top 20 investment banks globally. In terms of assets, RBC is the sixth-largest bank in North America.