Quoted:
Marginal Utility
Dealing with contemporary consumerism, capitalism, and the life it permits.

20 June 2008The time cost of free goods
If goods become free, but consumption takes time, we may find ourselves in danger of being overwhelmed with things we have acquired that are demanding the time to be used. This hidden time cost of seemingly free things is easy to overlook, because we don’t customarily think of goods costing us anything but money. But internet distribution is changing the economics of cultural consumption, unleashing the attention economy, and forcing us to consider how we budget our limited time for information intake.

Quoted: "This is a pure advertising play," Pate explains. "It not only creates scale to rival Google for consumer reach but leverages the recent acquisition of both companies to monetize the fastest growing segment of online advertising: display. With search capped out in terms of category growth, critical mass in garnering the lion's share of display ad dollars is incredibly compelling."

As the leader of a display ad firm, Pate's take on the bid meshes with her own business model. However, recent numbers from comScore buttress Pate's analysis.

With 19 percent of the display advertising market, Yahoo is the industry leader, edging out News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, which tallies 16 percent of the sector. Microsoft, by comparison, is a distant third, with only 6 percent of the display market. But a combination of Microsoft and Yahoo would give one company a quarter of all display advertising in a fast-growing field that Google hasn't been able to penetrate. To date, Google has only a 1 percent share of the display market.

Quoted: Standing between a marriage of Microsoft and Yahoo may be the technology behemoth that has continually outsmarted them: Google. In an unusually aggressive effort to prevent Microsoft from moving forward with its 4.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo, Google /