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.