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Google Plans To Sell Part of DoubleClick
mudimba writes "Google has announced that they will be selling the search engine marketing branch of recently acquired company DoubleClick. Google's reason for the sale is that they do not want to appear to be giving preferential treatment in search rankings to DoubleClick customers. Tom Phillips, director of Google's integration with DoubleClick, said, 'Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google's mission and core to the trust we ask from our users.' Google was under scrutiny from the European Union and the FTC over their purchase of DoubleClick, but both eventually approved the deal."
They should sell it to M$.
See what I did? I substituted S with $. That's wit.
Given that the entire world is already divided between people who believe the conspiracy theories circulating about Google and people who love Google unconditionally, I doubt they really care too much about appearances -- people are going to think whatever they want.
More likely this is to keep them out of court.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
This is similar to the recent two-finger salute given to the BPI (British equiv. of RIAA) over their proposed "Three strikes and you're out" strategy.
By putting the customer's desire/need first, they gain the customer's trust.
This used to be called good business.
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
And just as an extra note - the banner ad that appeared when I posted that comment is hosted on ad.doubleclick.net.
Now... when is Adblock going to get updated for Firefox 3 Beta 3!
If you now have search and banner campaigns through DoubleClick, suddenly your search campaigns are shuttled off to some other company? You can't feed both campaigns off the same budget anymore or access all your performance indicators in one place?
Sounds like Google is crippling DoubleClick's search business to provide a dubious benefit.
Comment of the year
Of COURSE it's about money, but that doesn't mean it's not ALSO about morality!
The bean counters create a probability curve to estimate how much revenue they could lose if the perception were to become that GOOG is manipulating their results and giving preference to the customers paying DC for search engine marketing.
That is, how much would they lose by looking amoral.
Subtract that from the projected revenue from that DC unit.
If the number is negative on most points in the probability curve, then it's a no-brainer.
But even if it's in the "barely positive" territory, say, less than $10MM a year, I could still see an enlightened manager, thinking of that motto, making the decision to forgo that marginal revenue to maintain brand cachet that is difficult to value but that could be negatively impacted by the perception of conflict of interest.
So, certainly, it's an issue about money. But that doesn't preclude accounting for the morality of it.
They were buying for market share less than the employees, there were obviously going to be redundancies, there always are in these mergers.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Well, that's not shocking. They've bought a company whose core technology and services are not only very like their own, but in general are vastly inferior. For the most part, they bought the customer base, not the people.