Advertisers Not Backing Google/Yahoo Deal

Now we know that advertisers, and lots of them, don't like the idea of Google gaining more control over search advertising.

Today the Association of National Advertisers, which represents 400 companies and whose board counts executives from some of the biggest, announced that it has written to the Justice Department to object to the proposed Google-Yahoo search advertising partnership.

The proposal "will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising," according to the announcement by ANA president and CEO Bob Liodice.

The Justice Department is currently reviewing the proposal, in which Google would provide some search advertising for Yahoo. About a dozen states are scrutinizing the deal as well.

Google is already the world's No. 1 Internet company and, according to its critics, it could gain a monopoly in Internet advertising if the deal with Yahoo is permitted. The ANA warned that " a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90 percent of search advertising inventory."

But Google has responded that consumers and advertisers would benefit from the deal because its method of determining what ads to place beside a search query is the best in the industry.

Apparently, many of the large advertisers represented by the ANA don't see it quite that way.




READ AT WASHINGTON POST