I have seen a significant switch from patient payments using Amex to VIsa/Mastercard as their cash back programs expanded. I would have suggested to Yahoo to use a cash back model for purchases for a lot less than the $72 million they wasted on advisors when they rejected Microsoft’s offer last year.

Read the Wall Street Journal article.

Another logical step would be acquisition of the independent Category Leaders. Content trumps cookies.

Read the Wall Street Journal article.

Yahoo! recently made a huge change to benefit search advertisers by finally (after getting around intellectual property restrictions) allowing reasonable geo-targeting. Yet Yahoo! has not made a big deal about it. My data suggests that the prior lack of reasonable geo-targeting really hurt Yahoo! vs. Google among knowledgeable search advertisers. My data also predicts that Yahoo! search revenue could dramatically shrink because of it but this is necessary because prior Yahoo! search advertising costs were unnecessarily high before the geo-targeting initiative.

Yahoo! will have to prepare for lower search revenue while also considering unique patentable ways to get Internet users to choose it for search over Google. This could include a points system like that used by the credit card companies.

Read the Wall Street Journal article.