Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer: Firefox Deal Will Help Grow Search Share; Some Mobile Ads Won’t Come From Bing

Will Yahoo’s new deal with Firefox help the company grow search traffic? Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said she hopes so — and she hopes the Yahoo-Microsoft alliance will grow along with it.

In an interview today with Marketing Land, Mayer declined to reveal specific numbers regarding traffic Yahoo expects to gain from the deal. But she did say she hoped it will help Yahoo itself grow, rather than Bing:

I think that if you look at the overall search space, in Yahoo’s case, we’ve been trading share with our partner Microsoft for some time.

That said, the whole thesis about partnership is that we wanted to ultimately gain search share against the broader ecosystem. It hasn’t really accomplished that.

I think, however, this partnership does allow ideally Yahoo to grow its share and hopefully the collective search alliance to grow its share.

To break that statement down and explain it more, Yahoo and Microsoft signed a deal in 2010 that the companies expected would help them both grow share against Google.

Instead, what happened is that Bing has grown share consistently since that time — share that it has taken not from Google but from its partner Yahoo. This past June, Yahoo hit an all-time low, dropping just below 10% share of the U.S. search market. It’s recovered to about 10% since then, but just barely.

Mayer’s hoping that Firefox will be a way for Yahoo to finally grow some of its own share. Up for grabs are some of the 100 billion searches that Firefox says happens via its browser per year.

Those searches have, until now, been powered by Google. That’s why the deal may help the Yahoo-Microsoft partnership finally achieve its growth ambitions for both partners. This is search activity that Google will lose.

How much is unclear. Firefox hasn’t said what percentage of its searches are U.S.-based, which is what the Yahoo deal covers. The company said it will check on this for us, and we’ll share that number when we get it.

Google Stays The Firefox Default In Europe

Google will continue to be the partner for Firefox in Europe. Neither Yahoo nor Mozilla CEO Chris Beard clarified for Marketing Land why Yahoo didn’t get the Europe distribution, as well.

Mayer said there was at least a “framework” on how Yahoo might secure further distribution.

Yahoo Will Sell Some Mobile Search Ads

Mayer also confirmed that Yahoo’s extending its reach this way is perfectly in keeping with the terms of its Microsoft partnership. Behind the scenes, Yahoo’s unpaid “editorial” listings will still be coming from Bing. Paid search ads will largely come from Bing — with one key exception: mobile.

On mobile search, Yahoo said that ads will be from both Bing and the Yahoo Gemini marketplace.

More About The Deal

For more information about the deal announced today, see our stories on Search Engine Land:

• Yahoo Replaces Google As Default Search Provider in Firefox
• Yahoo’s “Clean” Search Design For Firefox & Yahoo Users Looks Even More Like Google