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.
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.
"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."
