"The deal offers great opportunities for both
companies to share great assets with each other," Semel
said. "It's all about creating more value and a better
experience for users as well as for advertisers."
Neither Yahoo executives nor shareholders mentioned the deal
at the meeting, but several shareholders complained that
Yahoo hasn't done enough to compete.
"It seems like you're being outsmarted by a couple of
Stanford dropouts at Google," Edward Abramczyk said in
addressing Yahoo's management.
"Google's business has boomed. We lost billions of dollars
in revenue to Google and others," said another shareholder.
Semel reminded shareholders that although search advertising
is the leading way to make money, Yahoo is ahead of its
rivals in providing services, such as e-mail, instant
messaging, news and music, which people spend more time
using.
"We think the Internet is still in the very early days," he
said. "We have a leadership position in a number of the most
heavily used things on the Internet."
As previously reported, under the deal with eBay, Yahoo will
become the exclusive third-party provider of all graphical
ads on eBay and will also provide new text ads on some
search results pages. Yahoo search and site links will be
integrated into a co-branded version of the eBay toolbar.
Meanwhile, eBay's PayPal service will be the online payment
method used by Yahoo customers, merchants and publishers and
will be integrated into product offerings. The two companies
will also explore co-developing their respective voice over
Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. That project will look at
releasing "click-to-call" ad technologies on their Web
sites, using both Yahoo Messenger with Voice and eBay's
Skype service.
"It's a unique partnership. It's the first time we've gone
off (our) network with graphical ads" said Yahoo Chief
Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig. eBay is a "huge, fertile,
relevant environment" for advertisers.
Specific financial details were not released, but both
companies said the deal would not be material to 2006
results and that any financial impact for 2007 and beyond
would be detailed when the companies issue their outlooks
for those periods.
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