Yahoo and AOL (Or Anyone Else, for That Matter)

I do not see this happening. There, I said it. Now it’ll go and happen, of course. Yahoo swallowing AOL might make for great headlines, and worthy speculation by folks in the know, but the plain truth is that buying mass won’t fix Yahoo’s woes. It has plenty of mass. Getting more doesn’t address the main issue dogging the company: its lack of a monetization engine as efficient as Google’s. At the end of the day, that’s the biggest issue. Panama, which is rolling out to advertisers now, is the company’s most important project in years. If Yahoo is going to compete against Google – in everything from deals like YouTube to partnerships like MySpace – it has to get search monetization up to snuff. The rest will follow.