Slashdot Mirror
Google Considered Too Big To Fail
theodp writes "Doc Searls is worried about the way Google makes money. 'Nearly all of it comes from advertising,' he frets. 'That's what pays for all the infrastructure Google is giving to the rest of us. As our dependency on Google verges on the absolute, this should be a concern.' Have we reched Peak Advertising? Blogger Dave Winer says amen, asking if Google is already 'too big to fail.'"
Nothing is "too big to fail".
At the current rate, people will shy away from Google as it's becoming an omnipresence on the internet which is raising concern.
There are numerous examples of things that could not be that happened, like the Titanic, Yahoo and Enron.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
... but he probably doesn't.
Is $COMPANY "$BUZZWORD"?
$PUNDIT says $COMPANY has utilized its $PRODUCT too much and $GOVERNMENT needs to do something about it. $BUZZWORD happened to $OTHER_COMPANY and $COMPANY is on the same path.
$FLOATNG ADVERT
$CEO says $COMPANY is responsbile. $OTHER_PUNDIT disagrees.
If we've reached "peak advertising" its not Google which will suffer but TV and print...
Part of the beauty of what Google has done is made advertising cheap, quantifiable, and universal. Anyone can do it, anyone can measure it, and its cheap.
If a company wants to spend advertisement money efficiently, they spend it through Google. If they don't, they throw it away on the Superbowl, where the audience is 100M, and $3M an add, so that costs $.03 for each person who sees the add, regardless of whether they are interested, paying attention, or relevant.
Compare that with advertising through Google, where if you say, advertise on slashdot, not only is it cheaper per person, but its only geeks who may be interested in the ads presented.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Really? How dependent are you on Google?
For searching, you can always use Yahoo or Bing, or a few others. For replacing GMail, you can always use POP access to download your mail and keep it locally, run your own mailserver (after informing people of your new address), use your ISP's mail system, or another free email service. If you're using Google Maps for something, you could make do with Mapquest. If you're an advertiser on Google, there are lots of sites that would be happy to have you advertise on their sites instead. If you're doing SEO, you can follow Yahoo or Bing's rules at least as easily as Google's. If you had no Android phones, you'd still have iPhones. The list goes on for the vast majority of their offerings.
In all cases, Google has its dominant position not via lock-in, but by delivering services that are on par with or better than its competitors. Either that or sheer habit. But that's significantly different from, say, a Windows user's dependency on Microsoft.
I am officially gone from
When you search on almost anything on Google, all you get is a listing of people who sell some item with your search term in the product name. Sometimes it isn't even that. Sometimes it a page that is another advertising search page.
At least when you search for something in Wikipedia you get to a topic, not an advert. The fact that people select Wikipedia to go to so often is likely why a Wikipedia search result is almost always near the top of a Google search. Most of the time, it is the only type of information a person is looking for. 'Tell me about subject xyz', I don't want to fucking buy it, just learn about it. A lot of the time now, except when looking for product (one I have already bought) or programming forums I just search Wikipedia immediately. The articles also usually have enough external links to get me surfing for more info without needing to use Google too much.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
BING is a recursive acronym. Bing is not google.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
(Think Saturn. They weren't unionized, but profitable.)
Uhh, Saturn was unionized (UAW) and was only profitable for 1 year out of its entire existence (1993).
Not to say that the union was the problem, but not having a union does not give you the able to ignore trends, consumer demands, and quality controls and still have a successful company.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Read "Natural Born Clickers, the ComScore study referenced in the article. "Only 8% of Internet users now account for 85% of all clicks". And that 8% has lower than average income and doesn't buy much on line.
The basic problem with Google's business model is not a killer problem for Google. It's for all those sites sucking off the "Google Content Network" teat. Ads on search results have value because they're presented at when the user is looking for something. Random ads on web pages aren't that valuable to advertisers. Most advertisers run them because Google's AdWords systems bundles them with search ads. (Advertisers can opt out, but the opt-out checkbox is hidden and doesn't opt you out of everything.) Worse, Google charges the same price for a click on a search result ad and a Google ad on some random site, while studies show that the search result ad is worth maybe 20x the value of the ad on some random site.
Amusingly, Google offers a lower price for the "content network" ads, but they only tell advertisers about it when they try to opt out of the "content network" program.
The big advertisers have figured this out. Note how few Google ads on random web sites are for major brands. Google tries to keep advertisers from developing metrics to measure click-through value; the AdWords contract prohibits advertisers from sharing their click stats. But enough information has leaked out that advertisers are getting wise to this. There's now a Content Network Cleanser product to kick bottom-feeder sites out of an advertiser's campaign. But it's retrospective; you pay for useless clicks, then find out about them and block those sites.
A shakeout is coming. As more advertisers get wise to the uselessness of the "Google Content Network", they'll opt out, while keeping their search ads. Google will have to cut the price for ads on third-party sites. This will put the screws on all the sites whose entire revenue stream comes from those ads. (Like Slashdot.)
This won't kill Google, but it may cut into their revenue.
All those car factories would still have existed, just with new owners now. They could still make cars, or perhaps something else. They would have needed workers, and would have been in a position to offer a fair, but less ridiculous salary and benefits package for factory work.
A real bankruptcy and liquidation is that, stuff gets sold, the new owners use it. Stockholders would have been taught a lesson that they need to do due diligence on their executive employees better, management would have learned you can't be stupidly top heavy, and the rank and file boys would have realized they need to not expect as much as they think they are worth, not in a global economy.. So all around, it would have been better for that to happen, long range.
I feel the same away about those bloated tick parasite casino banks, they should have been allowed to go bankrupt, then we could have sorted out what all those scam paper financial products are really worth, which is..not near as much as they contend now. I think society has hit "peak wealth leeching" with those guys.
Ya, it would have sucked a little for a couple of years, but the resulting economy would have been MUCH better. Less stupid overpaid fatcats sucking out of the system, more middle class actual productive wealth creation jobs back.
As it is now, all they have done is reward those who failed in the first place, and given them incentive to just follow the same failed policies. Quite dumb really. Slap this generation and the next several in debt for this to happen, too. That's not dumb, that's outright criminal.
That might not be entirely true. Suppose for a minute that I completely believe that you have been able to 100% elude yourself from all mass media. I'd then imagine that you choose to buy products based on one of a few things:
1.) Location, Location, Location. If you pass by a Starbucks and get your coffee there, then their convenient, prominent location constitutes a form of advertising. How'd you know it was there? I'm guessing it had something to to with the highly recognizable green mermaid logo. You didn't just waltz into an unlabeled building saying "I hope they serve coffee here", you knew that Starbucks sells coffee. Location-based advertising.
2.) Word of Mouth. This is essentially indirect advertising. The person your heard it from had to have heard of the product from somewhere. If you both buy Windex because your friend saw the commercial and liked it enough to recommend, then you bought some yourself. Indirect advertising.
3.) Browse-and-Buy. Many companies pay for retailers to prominently place their products in retail stores with the intent of increasing the awareness of a product. You might hunt for a particular item that's on sale, but if you go to Staples for an SD card, a prominent display containing competitively priced Sandisk memory cards is likely to influence your purchase for Sandisk over PNY or Lexar. Retail placement advertising.
4.) I bought a Creative Sound Blaster Extigy back in 2001. It came with a limited edition of Mixmeister 3. After all, I was buying a high quality sound card, presumably for a laptop (it was the only USB audio interface I could find at the time), so DJ software was a fairly logical thing to bundle. Over the past decade, I've bought four upgrades to that product, earning Mixmeister plenty of coin. I didn't know I needed their product, but I had it, so I tried it and found out how great it is, and my wallet soon followed. Product bundling advertisement.
5.) 7-11 is open 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46.05 seconds a year. Where I live, going three miles out of range of one must be intentional. Do you think that all these stores are profitable at 2:30 Christmas morning? of course not? Heck, after 10ish I see the clerks watching videos on their Blackberries, because I'm the only customer they're going to see for the next three hours. The reason why 7-11 is open all the time is because they intend to make sure that it's in my head that if I need coffee, any time, day or night, bank holiday or not, I can get my coffee, cigarettes, lottery tickets, beer, or motor oil. They don't need to advertise on a billboard to make people aware of them. They just need to be the only place that's open and carries the item they need at midnight, and they've made it much more likely for the customer to return. Mindshare advertising.
These are just a handful of examples of advertising I can think of that requires no billboards, magazine spreads, TV spots, or product placement in movies. Saying that advertising doesn't affect you is foolish and untrue - you're lying to yourself.