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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."
Google are also planning to cut hundreds of jobs at doubeclick
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.
I hope it's the evil part.
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."
Their main business model is selling ad space on people's websites - find advertisers can be incredibly hard work, so a lot of sites outsource that to Double Click.
They then sell the advertising space, and provide web apps that allow the advertisers to see how effective the campaign is, and site owners to see who's buying their ad space, and how much they're paying.
That's also the reason there was so much scrutiny of this deal, since the largest banner advertising company has now been bought by the largest text advertising company.
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
Since I worked for a competition, I feel compelled to mention: DoubleClick may, or may not, be the largest banner advertising company on the web. They're definitely in the top three, but this isn't an industry that actually has metrics to determine who the "leader" is, like most industries do, and DoubleClick (and the other two big players in this field) don't share enough data to really determine this.
DoubleClick is certainly the most visible to the public, though.
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.
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Nope.
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Done