TechTreak

After a difficult year, Yahoo! now seems to be moving on its own. Today, Google formally announced that they have ended their advertising agreement with Yahoo! The agreement was announced in June at a time when Yahoo! was facing takeover attempts from Microsoft. At the same time, they also had a proxy battle with Carl Icahn, which was for the control of the company.

Yahoo! & Google had both voluntary agreed for delaying their partnership and it was undergoing a review by U.S. Department of Justice. Government reviewed the deal, as they had anti-trust fears over this partnership.

Amongst the many concerns made by the U.S. Department of Justice, one was that the partnership between Yahoo! & Google would have eventually led to the 2 companies enjoying a combined share in the internet market of around 90%, with Google contributing 70.4% and Yahoo! 19.4% (these figures are based on a statistics submitted by a web-based company in September 2008). Competitors, other then these two, which includes the likes of Ask, AOL and MSN Live don’t even have a double digit contribution in the market. This being said, it was highly unlikely for U.S. Department of Justice approving such a deal of higher proportions over anti-trust concern and without major restriction within their partnership.

In their statement, Google cleared that this move of end partnership with Yahoo! was primarily due to the fact that such agreements have very little chances of taking place without going through lengthy legal battles. It was also reported by current Search Engine Giant that there were some advertisers, who had concerned over their agreement with Yahoo! They felt that with the company moving forward for getting this deal executed properly, it would have only distracted them from carrying out their core mission.