Overture Loses First Customer Over Yahoo! Deal
from the more-coming? dept
When Yahoo! bought Overture my first thought (and subsequent Techdirt post) questioned whether or not this might backfire. Overture had started out as the branded search engine GoTo.com, but eventually toned that down and focused entirely on selling paid-search terms on other search engines. The problem with Yahoo! buying them is that Yahoo! competes with many of the companies Overture sells its services to. So, I wondered if the customers would start bailing. Microsoft was clearly already planning on coming up with their own solution, so that one won't be a huge surprise. However, it looks like some other customers are already reconsidering their deals with Overture. T-Online, over in Europe, specifically cited the Yahoo! deal as a reason for killing their Overture agreement and switching to Google. I'm sure that Google salespeople are pushing this angle as much as possible with other Overture clients. Of course, Yahoo! might not care. They want Overture so they can power their own search offerings, and don't care as much about powering search for others. Still, it does shift the nature of what Overture was doing, and makes you wonder if they'll find they overpaid.
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