Yahoo v. Facebook enters the annals as a big waste of money

The only thing left of former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson's legal assault on Facebook is a vague improvement to a partnership that already existed.

by Rafe Needleman

July 6, 2012 2:14 PM PDT

Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn apparently undid previous CEO Scott Thompson's patent attack on Facebook.

(Credit: Greg Sandoval/CNET)

Yahoo's interim (and most likely the next permanent) CEO Ross Levinsohn just took the step that many were hoping he would: he successfully killed the patent lawsuit against Facebook that Yahoo's previous CEO Scott Thompson had instigated.
The two companies just announced that they have replaced their legal battle with an expanded advertising and content partnership. Before the Thompson lawsuit, the companies already had a working partnership. This deal takes that further.
Given the companies' about-face and their mutual decision to cease hostilities, it's also clear that the lawsuit wasn't worth the expense. Even if Yahoo under Thompson had had its way, the upside still would have been limited with Yahoo making some money, but nothing else, according to patent analyst Florian Mueller of the FOSS Patents blog. "This wasn't about market share," he said. "It wasn't like Apple and Google's patent battle, where the combatants hoped to impose their business model on the other company."
In its litigation against Facebook, Mueller said that Yahoo was not going to regain market share nor even sustain it. "It was just going to make itself more unpopular," he said.

Google: We drove $80B in U.S. economic activity last year

   The company says that it was able to tally that mark for 1.8 million businesses, Web site publishers, and non-profits across the U.S.

by Don Reisinger

July 2, 2012 9:45 AM PDT
Google is driving serious economic activity in the U.S. -- at least, that is, according to Google.
The search giant today unveiled its 2011 Economic Impact report, and said that its search and advertising tools, including AdWords and AdSense, drove $80 billion in economic activity across the U.S. last year. The company said it reached that figure with help from "1.8 million businesses, Web site publishers, and non-profits across the U.S."
In order to arrive at that figure, Google used some fancy math. The company estimates that businesses that use AdWords make $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on the advertising platform. In addition, the company assumed that a business will receive five clicks in search results for every one click on their ads.

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"If search clicks brought in as much revenue for businesses as ad clicks, these two assumptions would imply that businesses receive $11 in profit for every $1 they spend on AdWords," the company said. "This is because, if advertisers receive 2 times as much value from AdWords as they spend on AdWords, and they receive 5 times as much value from Google Search as they do from AdWords, then the total profit they receive is 11 times what they spend."

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