Permission Marketing is a relatively new idea: evangelized by Seth Godin, he defines it this way:
Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.
Search Advertising is a large market: Google is set to post revenues of more than $4 Billion this quarter alone. So it is understandable that many companies, including AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo, want to take some of this money away from Google; as a good capitalist, I can understand.
My complaint is with their methods. Recently I updated my Yahoo Messenger; after completing this, I found Yahoo had installed their toolbar without an obvious location to opt out. They also attempted to change my home page and default search; to this, Google’s toolbar fought tooth and nail, resulting in a dialog box war. When I removed the toolbar, Yahoo actually added a menu with links to their pages, where my favorites menu previously lived. This is not unlike a door to door salesman offering a free sample, then redecorating your kitchen with his branded wallpaper.
Today, I updated AIM, and the default installation included much of the same: they wanted to change my home page, default search, etc. To their credit, the opt out was visible and easily accessible. Again, however, this is not creating a permission asset, but attempting to meet a quota for users by force.
Search Advertisers should intuitively understand permission marketing: the act of clicking on an ad because it is relevant to your search query is a foundation to permission marketing. Why, then, are they attempting to change my entire web experience because I chose to download one tool? If Twitter or Facebook did this, they would suffer from a significant PR nightmare. Search Engines, please stop seeing your free tool as leverage to control my lens of the web; while audible banner ads are annoying enough, this is simply intolerable, and will result in a loss of market to open platforms such as Meebo. [end of rant]