Wall Street went bonkers yesterday over a ComScore report indicating that Google paid ad clicks growth had literally collapsed. Is that good or bad for Microsoft's Yahoo acquisition? The answer is complicated, in part because there remains uncertainty about the decline's cause. If the problem is contained to Google, Microsoft could greatly benefit depending on execution. But if US economic uncertainty is the cause, Microsoft could be buying Yahoo at both a good and bad time.
Simply stated, Google's paid ad click rate declined 0.3 percent year over year in January, down from 25 percent growth in the fourth quarter. Sequentially, Google's paid click rate fell 12 percent between the October quarter and January. I obtained the data from separate Bear Stearns and Citigroup reports. ComScore didn't publicly release the data, which was available, today, in a monthly "custom" report available to clients. But a ComScore spokesperson confirmed the veracity of the data contained in both reports.
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