Yahoo!'s partnering with Movable Type and Google

Movable Type, which till the other day was preferred choice for professional and business blogs, is now also a part of Yahoo! Small Business. With this partnership, Yahoo! plugs the hole in its bouquet of offerings for small business - that of writing blogs. The advantage with Yahoo! Small Business is 2-fold. First, there's a wide range of products on offer, starting from basic web hosting at one end to high-volume online selling at the other end. Second, user has option to start small (just an online presence) and remain that way, or scale up gradually or at fast pace (depending on requirement) to be ultimately established as a popular online seller. Necessary ingredients needed on the way are provided by Yahoo!. A third advantage may perhaps be a fast-track inclusion in Yahoo! directory, though it's difficult to vouch if that really happens. All this long, there wasn't much choice for Yahoo's small business users to avail of an in-built blog tool. 'Virtual' explosion of blogs has shown socializing on net is now a favorite occupation for many. Though Yahoo! does have Flickr and 'del.icio.us' (acquired last weekend) in its fold that allow sharing of information and photos online, an ideal solution still eluded its small business users. With Movable Type, that wait is finally over. If one notices, there's a perceptible difference in the ways Yahoo and Google earn their revenues. Apart from the fact that the two, between themselves, command well over 80% search traffic, including both organic and PPC searches, there's little common between the two giants. Yahoo's earnings are more diverse, so to say. A big part of revenue stems from hosting nearly 30 million websites, of which hundreds of thousands are small business sites. In fact, one in every eight online stores in US is said to be hosted by Yahoo. Add to that other substantial incomes, like Overture PPCs', charges for directory inclusion, etc. Google, on the other hand, earns overwhelmingly from text-ads that are displayed on its search pages, and on 3rd party websites (AdSense). From pure business sense, it would seem Google has placed all its eggs in one basket. In theory therefore, Google's earnings should be more vulnerable to market forces. In practice though, the picture is completely different. It's to Google's credit that it has not only realized that there exists great potential of online advertising, it has also prized open the ways text-ads can be displayed. And how? AdSense is a great innovation. Millions of websites benefit from AdSense's revenue sharing. In recent time, Google has released several classy tools and services, all directed toward garnering more revenues from text-ads. A great thought that. As things now stand, Google has firmly positioned itself at the very top so as to corner maximum revenues from search traffic worldwide. In the process, Google has been able to overwrite the rules of search industry, which in any case is still considered nascent. How it holds on to the pole position in the coming days will be watched with great interest.