The nation awoke yesterday morning to stunning, world-shaking news – the ad deal between Yahoo and Google was kaput, finished, finito. Naturally this was cause for dancing and celebrating in streets and cities the world over but spare a moment of thought for Jerry Yang and the Yahoo crew. What now, after such a crushing defeat. Do they go it alone, and if not, who can they turn to? I put on my thinking helmet earlier today (the bottom half of a salad mixer with a few stray wires hot-glue-gunned to the perimeter) and came up with a few options for Yahoo to consider:

1)      Go Regional – The Justice Department, the selfsame folks who just scotched the Yahoogle deal, broke up national phone company AT&T back in the early 80s. Funny thing is those regional constituent parts ended up as being even more successful and profitable units when loosed from the mothership. So perhaps Yahoo could take a page out of that playbook and split itself into regionally based search portals: Yeehaw for the south, YouBetcha for the north (and way, way north), BigWhoop for hipster infested Williamsburg and so on…

2)      Merge with Twitter – Yahoo could tweak their search engine to only return 148 characters worth of results therefore beating Google at the simple, clean results game. Twitter gets an ad platform.

3)      Merge with Chrysler – Hear me out: Chrysler and GM are in merger talks and it’s unclear whether they will be able to move forward. Yahoo just went through its own deal hell. If this was a romantic comedy or a dingy bar, these two would be hooking up faster than you could say antitrust regulation. What innovations could we expect? Yahoo maps powered in-car navigation systems, Yahoo’s homepage in every dashboard and Yahoo display ads on the sides of minivans. BOSS style open source auto development?

4)      Get taken over by TimeWarner –  Hey this one actually makes sense : TimeWarner gets to be in the driver’s seat from day one, unlike the ill-fated AOL merger. Yahoo gets to populate its ad network with TimeWarner sites and TimeWarner gets to boost ad revenue for its web properties. Could Yahoo magazine be far behind?

5)      Embrace the name – Get into the beverage market by swallowing the Yoohoo brand. The combined entity? YaYooHoo.com.

7)       Headhunting Resource – Given the outflux of execs and layoffs of other employees why not become a one stop internet technology talent purveyor. That way Yahoo gets paid a fee for placing everyone who leaves (or is asked to leave) for another job.

8)      Go for the Cash – Give in to sweet sweet mammon and become an all porn search engine.  This of course would need to be handled just right so as not to confuse longtime users when their searches for, say, garden hose yields a link to the award winning film Garden Ho’s. Yahoo Finance would have to be spun off – perhaps to Bloomberg? And perhaps a name change might be in order – Whoopee.com?

As for Google, they can go back to their latest beta projects – perhaps spray painting clouds with geo-behavioral targeted advertising from their fleet of mist-powered airships. That one is probably still under wraps but rest assured, Google has plans. In the meantime let us know your ideas for Yahoo’s options going forward…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Google, Just for Fun, Search: News, Twitter, Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.