Google and Yahoo market share in Singapore
Here’s the unofficial market share data I collected from a quick survey done on Friday, 31 March 2006.
Google 50% – Yahoo 50% – MSN 0%
Last Friday evening, I gave a talk on hobby and the Internet to a group of more than 20 people. These are people who represent a large cross-section of the Internet search users in Singapore. And many of them are business owners.
It was quite surprising that no one in the audience used MSN search. But I am sure Microsoft has the financial power to embark on a marketing blitz and splash their ads all over my TV programmes, newspapers and even bus ad.
For now, it’s Google and Yahoo. It is no doubt that even for webmasters targeting a small market like Singapore (in terms of population but not in terms of spending power) will have to focus on getting good ranking on both Google and Yahoo. For some keyword terms, it is quite inexpensive to use Adwords and it costs only pay a few cents for a first page listing on Google search. However, advertising on Yahoo search is more costly as you have to go through Yahoo South East Asia office based in Singapore. And you pay by CPM. A typical campaign will cost $5,000 per month upward.
So if you are not on the first 3 pages of Google search listing, you should seriously consider using Adwords to get some traffic to your website while it is still inexpensive for you to experiment around.