Hispanic Online Implications of Yahoo! Microsoft Search Deal

Yahoo! and Microsoft’s recently announced a search partnership where Microsoft’s newest search engine, Bing.com, will power Yahoo!’s search functions while Yahoo! handles ad sales. The deal will not be fully consummated until some point in 2010, but it is important to understand the ramifications for the Hispanic online market today.

The US Hispanic Search Market Before the Yahoo! Microsoft Partnership

Just as Google dominates the global search market, Google currently controls the lion’s share of the US Hispanic search market. According to my not-so-scientific estimates (see below), Google controls close to 47% of the US Hispanic search market. Not only is Google.com the most popular site among US Hispanics, Google has also been very savvy in establishing partnerships with leading Hispanic publishers to power their search functions. These partnerships include, but are not limited, to AOL.com and AOL Latino, Fox Interactive Media (most notably MySpace), Univision.com, Terra.com, Batanga.com, Starmedia.com and Impremedia.

I calculate that Yahoo! currently holds about 27% of the US Hispanic search market. The majority of their US Hispanic search volume comes from Yahoo.com (the second most popular site among Hispanics) in addition to Yahoo en Español. From a partnership perspective, some deals of note include Yahoo’s integration with Mexican media giant Televisa’s web portal EsMas.com which is very popular among Mexican Americans, and also with Hispanic Digital Network’s array of niche Hispanic websites.

Microsoft is in third place with 13% of the Hispanic search market thanks to the third most popular site among Hispanics, MSN.com and MSN Latino. Microsoft also picks up Hispanic searches from it’s partnership with Facebook which reaches close to 8 million US Hispanics each month.

Ask.com rounds out the top four with 13% of the Hispanic search market.

The US Hispanic Search Market After the Yahoo! Microsoft Partnership

By teaming up, Yahoo! and Microsoft will represent about 40% of the US Hispanic search market, becoming a formidable competitor to Google. Today, Hispanic online marketers typically allocate search budgets first to Google, then to Yahoo! and finally to Microsoft if budgets permit. Tomorrow, I would not be surprised to see more money going to Bing to reach Hispanics online. That of course, assumes Yahoo! and Microsoft can provide a good user experience for advertisers, value to consumers, and simply get along.

Not-So-Scientific Methodology Used in This Post

To compute the Hispanic search market estimates used in this post, I used Hispanic unique visitors data from May 2009 from comScore Media Metrix recently published in the 2009 Hispanic Fact Pack for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox, AOL, Ask and Facebook. For all others, I computed Hispanic unique visitors from data provided by Quantcast, if available.