As many of you remember, Yahoo struck out for the first time on its own in mobile paid search last year since its divergence from Microsoft’s Bing Ads.
There has been some recent data that suggests that, even though Yahoo has just begun their venture into mobile paid search, the search engine has already begun taking shares from its search alliance partner by transitioning traffic previously served by Bing Ads.
Yahoo Gemini, a marketplace for native and mobile search ads, launched in February. Since then, Yahoo has been serving search ads to mobile traffic on their own properties through their newly released service. The rate at which ads Yahoo has been transitioning ads traffic from Bing Ads to Gemini has been going up quite a bit since the second half of last year. This information is all coming from the digital marketing firm, RKG.
You would think there Bing Ads would have some legal issue over Yahoo doing this, but apparently Yahoo isn’t violating any of the terms of the deal since mobile search wasn’t part of the search alliance deal.
According to USA Today, on Wednesday, the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer said that she is in talks with Microsoft about ways to change the search alliance deal that they had entered into five years ago.
If you are interested in checking out RKG’s data, or you want to learn about the impact of Yahoo’s moves in the mobile search arena, and what this could mean for the future of Yahoo’s business, check out the the coverage by Search Engine Land: Yahoo Gemini Gaining Mobile Search Share, But Not At Google’s Expense, Yet