Microsoft Looking To Sell Razorfish, Good Move

Jul 13, 2009 at 9:50am ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft Pitches Razorfish Deal to Big Agencies via the Wall Street Journal reports Microsoft is finally looking to sell off Razorfish, something we have been asking them to do since they acquired them.

Google sold search marketing firm Performics a while back, mostly due to the conflict of interest in Google running an unbiased search engine and search ad engine, and also owning a search marketing agency.

In Microsoft’s case, it doesn’t seem like they are looking to sell Razorfish due to the conflict of interest reason. Rather, they are looking to sell the company to bolster “ad-buying commitments” from large ad agencies. In fact, part of the deal would be ad buys across Microsoft’s “digital properties, such as its new search engine, Bing.” With Microsoft’s huge push with Bing and adCenter, having Razorfish around doesn’t sit right with me. Selling off Razorfish, with an ad deal, doesn’t feel right either. On the other hand, if there is clear transparency on what the deal would be, i.e. $X of adCenter credit, then that is a monetary exchange. But if the transparency is not there, that might lead to some confusion and lead people to believe that maybe Razorfish’s sale has some extra bang for its buck, in terms of organic listings at Bing. To be honest, I don’t think Microsoft would go that route, but you have to be careful to protect the new brand.


Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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