It Has to Be Quality

I was reading an article over at TechCrunch, Could Microsoft Knock Off Yahoo To Become Google’s Biggest Competitor?, and it wasn’t the main story that caught my attention, but something in the second paragraph:

Despite a $100 million Crispin, Porter + Bogusky advertising campaign, Ask saw its share of the search market decrease from 3.5% to 3.3%, although to be fair to Ask, Compete recorded a 2.6% rise in traffic.

This just proves that advertising will only get you so far – you still have to have a product that works well. There’s thousands of sites and applications on the web that are hugely successful that don’t have advertising budgets. $100 million is a lot of money if your marketshare went up 3% and is depressing if your marketshare actually went down.