Bing Growth Stalls In September, Yahoo Dives

The U.S. search share rankings for September are out.

Yahoo lost half a point, dropping to its lowest share ever (18.8%). Google gained half a point, rising to 64.9%. And Microsoft Bing gained a tenth of a point, climbing to 9.4% from 9.3%.

Since Bing launched with great fanfare and a $100 million ad campaign in June, it has gained 1.4 percentage points. This is movement in the right direction, certainly, but it's not enough to matter. The combined Bing-Yahoo, meanwhile, lost almost half a point of share in the month, dropping to 28.2%.

In the past few months, we have occasionally been asked when we're going to concede that our early skepticism about Bing was wrong and that it has in fact been a gigantic success. Our answer: When we see sustained share gains to the low to mid teens that don't appear to have been powered by simply buying search traffic from third-parties. We don't expect to be making this concession speech anytime soon.

Here's JP Morgan's Imran Khan on the September results:

ComScore released September 2009 qSearch volume and market share data for the US. We note that this is only one data point and is not necessarily predictive of 3Q performance. Following are the data highlights:

According to the data, total US core search volume increased 17.3% Y/Y in September, a slight decline from 19.2% Y/Y growth in August. The total 3Q Y/Y growth rate was 17.3% vs. 2Q’s 31.1% Y/Y growth.

Google domestic core search market share was 64.9% in September, up slightly from 64.6% in August. Google grew September core search volume by 20.9% Y/Y, down slightly from 21.6% Y/Y growth in August. Google domestic core search volume growth of 21.1% Y/Y in 3Q, is below 2Q's 37.7% Y/Y increase.

Yahoo! domestic core search market share dropped to 18.8% in September from 19.3% in August. Yahoo! grew September core search volume by 9.0% Y/Y, down from 16.8% Y/Y growth in August. Yahoo!’s 3Q domestic core search volume growth of 11.6% Y/Y is below 2Q’s 27.1% Y/Y growth.

Microsoft domestic core search market share was up at 9.4% in September vs. 9.3% in August. Microsoft grew September core search volume by 30.7% Y/Y, down slightly from 31.9% Y/Y growth in August. Microsoft domestic core search volume for 3Q was up 25.8% Y/Y, above 2Q's 20.4% Y/Y growth.

Ask Network domestic core search market share was flat M/M at 3.9%. Ask grew September core search volume by 6.1% Y/Y, down slightly from 6.7% Y/Y growth in August. Ask Network domestic core search volume was up by 4.5% Y/Y in 3Q vs. 15.6% Y/Y growth in 2Q.

AOL September domestic core search market share was flat M/M at 3.0%. AOL September core search volume declined 13.5% Y/Y, a slight deceleration from August's 17.6% Y/Y declines. AOL domestic core search volume was down 15.4% Y/Y in 3Q vs. 2Q's 5.1% Y/Y decline.

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