AOL, or previously known as American Online, is an American multinational mass media corporation. Search engine is one of its many services, and as of January 2016, it's powered by Bing. The company confirmed that "Bing now powers AOL's web, mobile, and tablet search, providing paid search ads and algorithmic organic search results to AOL's properties worldwide."
The partnership between AOL and Bing was first made back in June 2015. At that time, Microsoft announced that the company is handing off its advertising business to AOL. Under the 10-year deal, 1200 Microsoft's employees that were involved will be transferred to AOL.
In exchange for AOL taking Microsoft's advertising business, AOL will be using its search engine Bing to power its services. With Bing powering AOL, Google Search is being replaced with Bing's property. Both companies are subjected to affiliate marketing revenue sharing.
The end result of the partnership is Bing powering AOL.
In a statement, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Search Advertisings Rik van der Kooi, said:
"Our partnership with AOL brings additional scale and opportunity to advertisers and marketers. Today, 1 in 5 searches happen on Bing.com, and by providing Bing search results for the number 3 (Yahoo) and 5 AOL search providers in the US, Bing powers close to one-third of US PC web searches. Today’s announcement is testament to Microsoft’s ongoing focus on search advertising and our increasing scale that connects a marketer’s media buys to new publishers and audiences to help them achieve more impact for their business."
With Bing behind some parts of AOL, users will see some notable changes to ads. For example, Bing ads started showing, including the Campaigns and Reporting pages, as well as the Keyword and Campaign Planners. The changes are meant to add more value to the Network column and AOL's overall search.
Another noticeable change is the added to the Top Vs. Other column for AOL Search-Top.
AOL's website's URLs are also displayed in separate line items and aren't anymore consolidated for AOL-owned and operated websites.
Plus, actual website URLs will be displayed as separate line items (not consolidated) for AOL-owned and operated websites in the “Website URL” column of the “Website URL (Publisher)” report.
To advertisers, the partnership is showing minimal changes. In Bing's follow-up announcement, the majority of the changes are just additions to the already available AOL. Advertisers won't have to make any changes to their current Ad Distribution settings.
Google Out, Bing In
Google was powering AOL back in 2002. But at that time, Google was still young and was still having many ups and downs while AOL was already having a substantial amount of search traffic. Despite being an underdog, Google has succeeded in renewing the deal each time it came up. But in 2010, AOL took Google out of its consideration.
That year, the end of AOL deal didn't put much of a dent in Google's business. AOL has only about 1 percent of the search traffic in U.S. while Google has boosted its traffic to 65 percent. AOL ending the deal with Google didn't make the search giant notice the loss.
In 2015, Bing and Yahoo! were under the terms of a renegotiated deal, agreed that 51 percent of Yahoo!'s algorithmic results must carry Bing Ads. However, the deal doesn't extend to mobile searches.
In term of mobile search, Google is nevertheless the most dominant search engine. The tech giant is more dominant on mobile that it ever was on PC with more than 90 percent market share. Despite the huge difference in competing power, AOL powered by Bing is still having a significant boost.
Bing comes second to only Google with 14,6 percent market share. With AOL only generating 0.6 percent, the partnership marks a big increase to the company. As for Bing, the search engine can now tap into AOL's existing audience which generate billions of search queries a year.
It’s still a great win for Bing. It recently passed the 20% share mark in the US, and the AOL deal will give it a further nudge forward.
Also as part of today’s news, Microsoft is giving up its display ad sales business to AOL and says that Bing generates enough revenue to operate on a standalone basis, if it wanted. For more both of those topics, see our stories at Marketing Land below:
