Yahoo UK & IRELAND overlook Irish market yet again

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Yahoo UK & IRELAND overlook Irish market yet again

Yahoo UK & Ireland have launched another service which again has overlooked the Irish market. No matter who denies it the United Kingdom & the Republic of Ireland are extricably linked in culture, business, language, history etc. and therefore to ignore the Irish market is just plain idiocy. What makes it worse is that the site although on a co.uk is referred to as Yahoo UK & Ireland.

The service in particular is Yahoo local, have a look at the following sample search I performed on Yahoo local… says it all really. This information becomes particularly annoying when one combines it with the fact that Yahoo pay per click advertising is available for GEO targeting in 14 european countries but not Ireland, this dispite the fact that Yahoo have its european headquarters in Dublin. Is Ireland not a center of IT excellence? Do we not host major companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Dell, Intel and Oracle to name but a few? Have we not got Internet businesses to promote and market too? OK enough ranting from me.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 12:03 pm and is filed under IT, Ireland, SEO. 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.

7 Comments on “Yahoo UK & IRELAND overlook Irish market yet again”

1| Barry said,

3rd August 2006 @ 14:36

Good Rant Dave.

It’s a shame to think that so many people go to their Yahoo European HQ and think to themselves that isn’t it so nice to live here in “UK & Ireland”

Yahoo’s lack of interest in the Irish market when it comes to PPC will seriously hinder any chance of them making head-way into the market as Google continue to provide an excellent GEO targetted service. Maybe they (Yahoo) aren’t all that bothered at the moment, but there still is a sizable target market none-the-less that they are going to have serious difficulties ever capturing in the future.

2| Richard Hearne said,

4th August 2006 @ 09:59

I think this is all about market size (@Barry - no matter what you think we really dont count unfortunately, and the shambles that is broadband and internet penetration here isn’t helping). The fact that they (Yahoo) have such a miniscule (search) market share relative to Google (who might be carrying ~80& of search here) also means that this market just isn’t an attractive investment proposition.

WRT Yahoo search - how about all the Irish firms that subscribed to Overture PPC (you would be surprised how many Irish companies are using Overture PPC).

I don’t think that search is the main priority for Yahoo anymore (well not in US and Europe where search market is saturated, Asia yes). The name ‘Yahoo UK & Ireland’ is just a legacy from the early days. I don’t think they have any intentions of expanding that offering or branching off the Irish op (in fact Yahoo have stated this publicly I believe).

As regards the major global tech companies locating here, I think they will leave as quick as they arrived when it becomes cheaper in E. Europe and the likes. Low taxes are the primary attraction for these companies, while the high skills are keeping them here. Other countries are waking up to this and are quickly becoming as competitive, if not more competitive than us.

TBH I think that Ireland as the center of IT excellence is slightly overstated (in terms of exports yes we are up there, but the internal market is really playing catch up).

It is a shame that we are not serviced well by Yahoo, but hey, thankfully we can just head over to Google and normally find what we’re looking for!

Good post Dave!

3| David Callan said,

4th August 2006 @ 10:05

Yes I agree. They should really be comparing their service (PPC) with Google. Only the other day I was looking to see if it was possible to target ‘the island of Ireland’ on Adwords. It wasn’t directly as obviously it’s Ireland and UK, so if you wanted Northern Ireland and the Republic you would have to pick the UK in general too which is not what I was looking for.

Googles advanced targeting page has the ability for you to actually map out non circular points on their map system allowing you to pretty much target any geographic area you want. In my case I pretty much created a rectangle to cover the four corners of the island as a whole. This is very impressive and it’s something I’d like Yahoo to start looking at.

4| Richard Hearne said,

4th August 2006 @ 11:50

What blog s/w are you using David?

I find it useful to get alerts to new comments on subscribed threads. There’s a handy wordpress plugin for this.

5| David Callan said,

4th August 2006 @ 12:30

Hi Richard, you posted earlier when I was replying to Barry, happens on the forum a bit but didn’t think it would happen on the blog. Anyhow your most likely right about the size of the market here being the major factor but it’s still a bitter pill to swallow.

I’m using Wordpress. So would this just send an email to everyone when a blog post is updated or will the person have to specifically ask to be kept updated. Have you got any links for these plugins? I’m sure I can find one easily enough, but if you already are using one yourself?

6| Richard Hearne said,

8th August 2006 @ 10:37

Yep

Just checling for the name of the plugin now….

Subscribe To Comments. It adds a small checkbox below this textarea to recieve memail updates. Then after commenting you will recieve a mail whenever someone adds a new comment to that thread.

More likely to get people commenting (but I have to put far more time and effort into making quality posts over on my blog as the comments just aren’t rolling in, so to speak But hey, it’s only 2 weeks old so what can I expect)

7| David Callan said,

9th August 2006 @ 11:48

I had a look at that plugin yesterday I’ll try and install it later on tonight.

Your posts on your blog are good, speaking for myself I just find it difficult to put together smaller posts. My posts don’t get that many comments either and I get a good bit of traffic. I really wouldn’t worry about it yet, not after 2 weeks anyhow. Give it six months perhaps.

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Yahoo UK & IRELAND overlook Irish market yet again

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