comScore U.S are about to release their market share data for June, and, for Yahoo, it doesn’t look pretty. According to financial analyst notes, released early, the numbers also indicate that desktop search declined for the fifth consecutive month after a period of growth in mid-2013.
The headline that stands out amongst the rest however is one almost everyone would’ve predicted: Yahoo’s search share has now fallen below 10 percent. This is an all-time low for them, literally. The Yahoo and Bing combined ‘search alliance’ share remains flat at 29 percent. Seemingly, Bing has grown almost entirely at Yahoo’s expense. That’s no alliance!
Here are the figures for June – the search market share for each engine:
- Google: 67.6 percent
- Bing: 19.2 percent
- Yahoo: 9.8 percent
- Others: 3.4 percent
These figures do not include mobile search, which is an increasingly large share of overall volume. Mobile now drives more than 30 percent of total internet traffic in the US.
In an otherwise disappointing Q2 earnings release, paid search growth was one of the highlights. Yahoo paid search brought in $403 million in Q2 – a 5 percent increase vs. $385 million in Q2 last year. Eroding PC search volumes will however dampen Yahoo’s future growth capacity.
“With no apparent structural bottom in Yahoo’s search business, it is difficult to envision how Yahoo will be able to sustain the paid click volume growth it has reported for the past two years,” says Schachter. “We note that Yahoo’s reported search revenue includes its partner network; many of these partners were restricted by Google and thus switched to Yahoo (generating faster revenue and paid click growth). We believe that this is not sustainable, and we remain cautious on the long term structural challenges facing Yahoo in search advertising.”
According to StatCounter, Yahoo has a 9.3 percent share of the US mobile search market. Google dominates at 85 percent and Bing’s share is 5.5 percent.
