Ginny Marvin says, ““This is the best outcome marketers could have hoped for in the industry. This acquisition puts AOL on solid ground as the third platform CMOs must take a meeting with behind Google and Facebook. Balance of power is good,” said Jay Friedman, COO of programmatic media agency Goodway Group, of the pending Verizon deal to buy Yahoo for $4.8 billion.

Whether a Yahoo acquisition can lead to even a modicum of “balance of power” in digital advertising is the big question. Yahoo plus AOL, which Verizon bought last May for $4.4 billion, would give Verizon, the largest wireless telecom provider in the US, a reported 5 percent share of digital ad revenues globally. (That estimate may be a bit generous: eMarketer expects Yahoo’s global market share to fall below 2 percent to 1.5 percent in 2016 and AOL’s global share was estimated at 0.74 percent in 2014.) That compares to Google’s more than 30 percent share of all worldwide digital ad revenues and Facebook’s 9.6 percent share last year, according to eMarketer.

Many argue, however, that buying a 5 percent share of a $542 billion market for less than $10 billion is a relatively cheap price of entry for Verizon. Friedman and other digital advertising executives Marketing Land spoke with are cautiously optimistic Verizon is on to something”.

Ad industry execs cautiously optimistic Verizon-AOL-Yahoo can take on Google & Facebook

Marketing Land

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