Comcast wants mo-money
By Vivek | March 18th, 2007 at 10:34 pm ET
Taking a cue from Viacom, Comcast is spreading around the word that it is unhappy with it’s Google partnership. Just like some of the other major online properties including AOL and MySpace, search at Comcast.net is powered by Google’s search engine. According to WSJ, Comcast is supposed to be getting $70 million from Google by driving users to the search engine. Apparently, Comcast thinks it is getting a much smaller cut of the ad revenues as compared to what Google is holding back. Comcast is expecting this share to be around $100 million. And hence Comcast is negotiating with Microsoft to provide that service in case it cannot make headway in its talk with Google. However these tactics are just negotiation gimmicks since Live search comes nowhere near Google’s offering. If Comcast wants to alienate its users, yeah sure go for it. Even looking at the companies partnering with Yahoo, like Flock and Maxthon, I am pretty sure they would have lost quite a few users ’cause of the default search engine arrangement. Of course this doesn’t mean that Comcast shouldn’t shop around, but the options it has are pretty limited to start with.
on March 19th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Wow! Comcast is probably the only company I can think of that is more evil that Google. What a pair! I worked with Comcast as a project manager for a telecom company several years ago. Like many giant conglomerates, Comcast could make $100 million just do a better job of internal organizing and reducing waste.
You seem to be onto something in noting the trend to wards dumping on Google, I wonder who is manipulating the latest “dog and pony show”.
Just thoughts,
Phil Butler
on April 30th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
[…] Comcast, which had been making some noise lately about it’s relationship with Google and the amount of money it is making, today made a definitive more to explore more options. Comcast and Yahoo announced that they have entered into a new multi-year partnership for online display and video advertising services on Comcast.net. Comcast.net supposedly is one of the top 10 online site with more than 2.5 billion page views, more than 80 million videos viewed and 15 million unique visitors per month. […]