E-Commerce Blog

After surging 7 percent Tuesday on rumors that a former AOL executive wants to acquire Yahoo for as much as $30 billion, the beleaguered Internet portal’s shares were down nearly 5 percent at $11.02 per share in mid-day trading on Wednesday but closed flat as the market rallied. Jonathan Miller, former chairman and CEO of AOL, is trying to raise as much as $30 billion to buy Yahoo at about $22 per share, according to reports that first surfaced Tuesday. That’s significantly lower than the $33 per share, or $47 billion buyout offer that Microsoft made last February.

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Ex-AOL Boss Rumored Sniffing Around Yahoo

Yahoo is plugging its Internet radio service into CBS’s webcasting network in a move driven by dramatically higher fees for airing music online. Yahoo’s retreat from operating a standalone service, announced Wednesday, makes it the second major Web site this year to flee the rising royalty rates by hitching its radio service to CBS. AOL Radio, owned by Time Warner, hooked up with CBS in June. Yahoo’s radio channel, called “Launchcast,” will combine with CBS beginning in February.

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Ballooning Royalty Rates Chase Yahoo Radio Into the Arms of CBS

Google’s stock snapped out of its recent funk Tuesday after new data showed the Internet search leader is becoming even more dominant in the most lucrative part of the online advertising market. Internet research firms comScore and Nielsen Online both said the volume of search requests at Google has climbed substantially over the past year while rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are losing market share. The statistics, based on October search activity, bode well for Google’s fourth-quarter revenue.

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Google Investors Cheer Search Ad Market Reports

Once seen as immune to economic slowdowns, the online advertising sector has now become the downturn’s latest victim. Based on new data, New York City-based eMarketer predicts that growth in the online ad sector is slowing. In August, eMarketer predicted that online advertising would grow by 14.5 percent in 2009. Now, after months of economic turmoil that has seen the collapse of the real estate, financial and domestic auto industries, eMarketer predicts Internet ad spending will grow by only 8.9 percent in 2009.

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Online Ad Sector Showing Signs of Strain

Is Microsoft about to rebrand Live Search as “Kumo”? News reports on Monday had the software giant buying up domain names such as “Kumo.com,” “Kumo.net,” “Kumo.jp” and the like from CSC Corporate Domains, a domain registrar with which Microsoft often does business. There are two prevailing schools of thought regarding “Kumo” — Japanese for “cloud” and “spider” — at the moment. One, Microsoft wants to rebrand its search engine. Two, Microsoft will use “Kumo” to brand its new cloud computing products.

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Will Microsoft Get Search Branding Right With ‘Kumo’?