Microsft Makes Bid to Buy Yahoo!

[Mel66]

As reported by Adotas, "Microsoft this morning has made a bid to acquire Yahoo at a 64% premium to Thursday’s closing stock price to represent a $44.6 BILLION value, which is projected to be over a 30X EBITA multiple offer on projected 2008 earnings. Microsoft will allow Yahoo investors to accept stock or cash."

http://www.adotas.com/2008/02/microsoft-buys-yahoo/

Huge, huge news, folks. How will this affect the SEM world? How will the Yahoo and MSN PPC programs be affected? What will happen to adCenter / Panama? The questions swirling in my mind right now are endless! Let the speculation begin!

Funnily enough, my 10-year-old son broke this news to me - my kids are home from school (we're supposed to get a foot of snow today) and he heard it on the radio. Kids always have the scoop!

Melissa

Edited to add: Danny Sullivan live-blogged the MS conf call on this here:

http://searchengineland.com/080201-083640.php

[Discovery]

Kind of wish this were the other way around!

Yahoo has come out of the woods in this past year and MSN has been falling deeper in to them. I dont know how this will play out for the battle of the UIs, but one thing is certain they will attempt to integrate and make a best of bread which means another couple years of growing pains.

Should be interesting to hear more details.

Discovery

[BasicECommerce]

I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that it will change little in YSM and improve adCenter.
MSN just came out with Live.com as their new search engine. Live.com and Yahoo have very different algorithms and ranking structures. Because of this, the CPC programs work differently. If they merge them together, I'm scared for bad news.
I'd hope that they keep themselves unique and different.

[beu]

Yahoo stock up today 48.41% as of the time of this post.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=yahoo&hl=en