Sunday, March 7, 2010

Wasted ad dollars and Bing.

Much of the advertising we are bombarded with is a complete and utter waste of money, time and effort. This morning I woke up and for whatever reason started thinking of Bing, the Decision Engine.

I don't know how much Microsoft has spent with JWT creating ads for Bing, but let's be conservative and say that they've so far spend on the order of $250 million. For that quarter of a billion dollars, Bing's market share of search has grown from 2.69% share at launch to 3.39% share last month. In the same time frame, Google, which spends very little on advertising, has grown from 78.6% share to 85.7%. Most of Google's market share gains have come from Yahoo, which has fallen from 7.15 share to 6.09% and the Chinese search engine, Baidu, which has dropped precipitously from 8.77% to 2.61%.

I don't know how much income a percentage point of the search market gives a company. But I can't believe that the hundreds of millions that Bing has spent denigrating Google, a service people seem to love, could have been spent better elsewhere; for instance they could have been providing manis and pedis to homeless Haitians.

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