Bing and Yahoo feeds

A business with one supplier has no bargaining power. That is why arbitrage operators have always cared about the two feeds that are not Google's: the bing feed from Microsoft and the yahoo feed. They are smaller and they behave differently, and since 2024 they have been tightening as well.

How the two are connected

Yahoo and Microsoft have been tied together in search since 2009, when they announced an agreement for Microsoft to power Yahoo's search. The deal was amended in 2015 to give Yahoo more freedom, and renegotiated again in 2019, when trade press reported that Microsoft's platform would serve all search ads on Yahoo and AOL properties. The practical consequence is that an advertiser buying search ads in Microsoft Advertising can appear on Bing, on Yahoo and on the partner sites of both.

For an operator this means the two feeds are not fully independent. Much of the advertiser demand behind a Yahoo feed is Microsoft's marketplace. A policy shift at Microsoft can therefore be felt on both.

Microsoft's syndication network

Microsoft splits its search inventory into its own sites and its syndicated search partners. Partners range from well-known search engines that use Microsoft's ads to small publisher sites. Arbitrageurs reach the feed through companies with a Microsoft partner agreement.

Advertisers have more visible control than they historically had on Google. Microsoft Advertising lets them choose between the whole network and a narrower setting limited to Microsoft sites and selected traffic, and lets them exclude individual partner websites using a publisher report. Many agencies do exactly that, which directly affects a partner's coverage and RPC.

June 2024: the exclusions

The clearest public evidence of Microsoft's tightening came from Perion, an Israeli ad tech company whose CodeFuel unit was a major Bing distribution partner. On 10 June 2024 Perion cut its financial guidance, saying Microsoft Bing had notified it of a decision to exclude a number of publishers from its search distribution marketplace, on top of pricing and mechanism changes earlier in the year. Perion said similar notices went to other partners.

For the wider industry the message was that Microsoft, like Google, will remove partner inventory wholesale when it judges the quality or the economics to be wrong, and that a listed company with a long-standing agreement gets no special protection.

The Yahoo feed

Yahoo syndicates search ads to partner sites under its own agreements. For years it was a mainstay of Native-to-search campaigns, typically with a keyword lander: a page listing keywords, each opening a page of sponsored results. Access today is concentrated in a small number of providers, and current commercial terms are not published. Treat any specific revenue-share figure you see quoted online as unverified.

How they differ from Google in practice

What stays the same on every feed

• Advertisers pay per click and expect customers, so traffic quality drives price everywhere.
• Clicks judged invalid are not paid, and revenue can be adjusted after the fact.
• Traffic sources must be disclosed and approved. See traffic source approval.
• Misleading source ads, forced keywords and incentivised clicks are prohibited on all three.

Choosing between feeds

Operators compare feeds on RPS, not on headline RPC. A feed with a lower price per click can still win if it returns ads for more terms or if visitors click more readily. Volume matters too. A smaller advertiser base means that scaling one keyword quickly exhausts demand, and RPC falls as spend rises. The usual practice is to test the same campaign on two feeds with separate channels, then allocate by net revenue after adjustments.