Last summer, the pair announced that, post-regulatory approval, Microsoft would be providing search results for many of Yahoo’s search properties and migrating Yahoo’s ad-platform customers from Panama to Microsoft adCenter. Yahoo would be selling online ads (but not display ads) for Microsoft.
This week, the Yahoos said Yahoo’s goal is to complete the transition of its U.S. and Canadian ad customers to adCenter “before the start of the 2010 holiday season.” However, if it looks like “we cannot transition with quality before the holiday period, we’ll defer the transition until the early part of 2011.”
If you’re an adCenter customer, the two most important things you can do are to manage your Microsoft adCenter campaigns as usual, and keep your eye out for Search Alliance email updates. One thing you can do now is improve the relevance of your keywords and ads; for more info please see the Microsoft Transition Center and related blog posts.
If you’re a Yahoo! customer, you’ll start to receive emails from Yahoo! in the coming months with tips on how to prepare your campaigns for Microsoft adCenter. Yahoo! and Microsoft have worked together to develop transition tools to help guide you through the step-by-step process of moving Yahoo! campaigns to adCenter. Beginning in late summer, Yahoo! customers will be able to initiate the transition process, and have several weeks to complete it.
“To provide as much flexibility as possible, we intend to offer a window of several weeks in late summer, during which you can choose the time to initiate and complete your transition,” according to a Yahoo blog post.
Microsoft is expecting to lose $300 million in the first two years of the deal, then start earning a “decent return,” explained as “$400 million steady-state,” the Redmondians acknowledged last year.