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From the point of view of advertisers, this announcement is definitely A Good Thing. There are clear benefits and there seems little doubt that Google needs the competition. So in the short term we can all celebrate.

There are three clear benefits for advertisers that will arise from this partnership.

Perhaps the biggest is a simple result of the increased scale and reach of the combined offering. With a near-30% market share, campaigns will become easier to scale, long-tail keywords will be easier to monetize and analytics programs will have more data with which to work.

Microsoft and Yahoo, after a long courtship, finally got hitched and announced a 10-year deal in which Microsoft’s Bing search technology will power Yahoo’s sites. A quick summary of the deal from the perspective of an advertiser:

The ongoing fight against the Internet Tax took a bad turn last week when Rhode Island followed New York and signed its own version of the Internet Tax into law. As always Melanie Seery has the smartest commentary on this in which she points out that Rhode Island was being watched carefully by legislators nationwide after Arnold the Gubernator’s veto of a similar bill in California.

It seems as though Google has finally tired of the Google Money Tree offer and other AdWords get-rich-quick schemes and they are now telling many of the relevant advertisers that their ads will no longer be accepted.

The precise language that Google is using describes the banned ads as those that “promote a misrepresented affiliation with Google” and we assume it includes some of the deliberately misspelled ads we’ve seen that use terms such as Goolge, Goggle and Googlle

The Performance Marketing Alliance led another lobbying swing through Sacramento this week, trying to dissuade cash-starved political leaders from imposing a so-called “nexus tax” on California’s affiliates. An update on the PMA’s education effort will be included in the upcoming issue of Revenue, and you can contact Karen Garcia of GTO Management if you’d like to help block the tax.

The inaugural Affiliate Convention in Denver appeared to be a huge success especially given it was a first-time event. The producers estimated 1,200 attendees – more than double what they expected, according to a report on MediaTrust’s blog. ClickBooth, NeverBlue and Hydra were among the 15 exhibitors. Other sponsors included Revenue magazine. Most of the attendees were affiliates who got in for free.

Hard times are good times for coupon sites. Compete recently released a list of the Top 10 coupon and deal sites that reflects how penny-pinching consumers are looking for more bargains these days. Top-ranked Coupons.com showed a 17 percent rise in visitors to 11.6 million during May from the year-ago level.  The biggest gains were at No. 3-ranked RetailMeNot.com, which recorded a 195 percent jump to 6.4 million, and at No.

Accusations of click fraud are nothing new in affiliate marketing, but the volume of complaints about Facebook recently has raised more than a few eyebrows. Now even the social networking gorilla is acknowledging “suspicious” activity. Facebook aims to nearly double its revenue this year to about $550 million, including a big boost from CPC ad sales.