From here (paid as usual):
Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and Google Inc. have entered exclusive negotiations over a deal that would have the search giant pay $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL, deepening their advertising partnership, according to a person close to the situation.
The talks shut out Microsoft Corp., which has been wooing AOL since January.
As part of the deal, AOL would be able to sell advertising among the search results provided by Google on AOL Web properties. AOL’s sales staff would also sell display ads across Google’s network of Web publishers.
Fascinating: AOL selling display inventory across Google’s network – in other words, AdSense. Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm………Now does Google have the right to let AOL sell my pages, if I am an AdSense publisher? Hmmmm. I guess I’d be OK with that if AOL reps know who I am, and what ads are endemic, and why my site works, and all that. But….will they? Or is this a land grab of sorts? Is this Google buying its way into having a real sales force?
Interesting.
Wow – I think Steve Balmer is going to run out of office chairs.
It’s actually kind of sad to see an old warrior like Microsoft walk away from the battlefield. 26 bil. in the bank and they couldn’t do a deal?
I don’t get it. Mostly I don’t get why they don’t get it!
Google wins the search war. The torch has passed and now MSN will continue to be marginalized.
Steve Ballmer? I think this confirms his assertion that Google is a stack of cards. They are paranoid about the 10% revenues AOL provides them through advertising. This unbelievable price they have paid for a 5% stake in AOL confirms this. The only innovation Google has come up with (well, the only innovation that can be monetised) is their toolbar – which is a bare variation on the spyware Claria/Gator developed in the late 90s. Why does no-one else see this?
Hi,
The most interesting part of this deal is AOL sales staff will be selling display ads across Google web publishers.
Ask Jeeves tried to do this recently in the UK (before shutting up shop) and although they had good partnerships with big media owners, advertisers were loathed to put there ads out onto “content networks” with little control of where they appeared.
Add to that the established CPM (cost per thousand) networks selling ads are finding their space increasingly crowded from Adwords and other PPC networks it seems bizarre that Google would want to get into it.
Furthermore, sales people are always wary of the untested and AOL staff will not want to risk burning relationships by selling Ads across multiple untested sites.
It therefore appears unlikely that this being section of the deal is going to provide any decent bottomline returns to either company…
“The most interesting part of this deal is AOL sales staff will be selling display ads across Google web publishers.” – in future it is good for google at the wallstreet 😉