AOL – The key for MSN to survive

MSN can and will survive with or without AOL, because MSN has Microsoft’s deep pockets.

But let’s face it, MSN is a distant third in the Search Wars, With Google taking 1/2 by itself, Yahoo taking 30% leaving MSN with roughly 10% Marketshare and AOL with 5% (powered by Google)… the little fractions remaining are spread among ASK, Dogpile and other tiny search engines.

We know what all the media reports are about market share, sorry guys, we are a bunch of search engine optimizers and know what our clients are reporting and we know what other firms are reporting.

MSN has a dismal market share.

The only real chance (other than the standard Microsoft approach of plugging MSN into Vista to the point where you can’t even visit Google without searching for it in MSN) would be to buy AOL.

This would gain them an additional 50% increase in traffic and put them at roughly 15% market share.

The negatives are that Google and Yahoo both want to deny MSN the chance because they know that MSN will use your desktop to market their product. Anything to slow them down now is a plus.

It’s intresting to see what happens. In our opinion in the end, MSN will buy AOL. They don’t really have much of a choice.

I also predict that Google and Yahoo will make sure MSN pays the highest dollars.

Looks like AOL is winner …. and they don’t even own a search engine. They own a domain name that uses Google.