Microsoft Acquires Shopping Engine JellyFish

Written by Pablo Palatnik on October 2, 2007

I love when Microsoft makes new acquisitions…just goes to show they are still very much alive in the game and struggle to always maintain and grow their market share. I spoke to an AdCenter rep last week comparing Google’s Quality Score to MSN’s Live Search and we started talking about Market Share as well. I belive he told me Live Search has seen about a 900% search increase in the past few months and reiterated how new LIVE was to the advertising game in terms of their PPC platform, etc.

Why is this important? I think this acquisition is to ramp up the search with shopping search, a great vertical angle to the engine. Google had its chance with Froogle, which i actually sold about 3 item and really liked it…it was a simple platform but I guess just didn’t go well with users.

Jellyfish really looks like a plain old shopping website but I have heard of it before. What’s different about this site than other comparison shopping engines? “You use Jellyfish.com just like you would any other shopping search engine to find the right product at the best price. But when you actually buy something from a store in our engine, we share at least half of what we earn by connecting you to that store.” WOW…great business model..especially to consumers…buy something and get paid for it…just giving you a nice big coupon. It’s said the revenue share is about 20-40%, but I’d have to dig deeper on that stat.

The incentive is there for the buyer…let’s see what MSN can do to really make this platform a part of their search and how well they can integrate it.

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE?