|
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Wow. A Google Operating System. We all knew it was coming, but it still feels weird to talk about it. It's a major departure from Google's humble roots... but it's a departure that left the station years ago, of course. Where better to read about it first than from Danny at Search Engine Land, though (wait for it) the very first mention of today's news item that I ran across happened to be by a fashion and entertainment reporter I happen to follow on Twitter. Hmmm.
The #1 browser in the market, IE, has long been buttressed by its integration with the world's #1 selling computer operating system. The ever-stronger #2 browser, Firefox, is not similarly blessed, making its rise even more impressive. The #3 browser, Safari, also has tight OS integration as its main beneficiary.
Google's browser, Chrome, is still languishing in fourth spot with 2-3% market share. I predicted they'd reach 7.5% share at least by 2010, and no more than 16%. Their chances of reaching 7.5% increase significantly if netbooks are sold containing the Chrome OS, but there's still a long ways to go. Inertia rules.
One open question facing all of this is: what's the business model with a free OS? Most of Google's lines of business outside of the ad-supported media continue to be cost centers. As the company grows, its profit margins continue to shrink. But perhaps taking over the world -- to say nothing of releasing cheaper, better software -- is more interesting than fat margins.
First dismissive mention of a potential Google OS on Traffick: November, 2003.Labels: google chrome, google os
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
The portal wars are back! This time around, perennial winner Google isn't battling it out with Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and, er, Excite and Snap.
Rather, it's left with the rather easier task of sucking the oxygen out of the rooms vertical players like Zillow try to breathe in, and then battling any potential public image drawbacks to its growing status as a vertical-devouring meanie.
In the wake of Google's entry into the aggregation of property listings, Hitwise's Heather Hopkins notes the importance of the vertical: last week, 2% of Google traffic was sent off to listings in the real estate industry.
This brings up the potential contradictions and disingenuousness of the search engines' efforts to tout the merits of what's being called Universal or Blended search. The "death of the ten blue links" is a sexy way of dismissing clunky old search results pages and opening the door to a new age of more context-sensitive search results, to be sure. But when directly asked if the strategy isn't a way to keep more users on their own properties rather than sending them to those "downstream" sites Hopkins et al. spend their careers following, the search engines generally indicate something to the effect that they would never contemplate such a thing, or would "weigh these decisions in light of what's best for the user." Perhaps. But as predicted, Google's moves into blended search have done little to increase traffic (for example) for any video streaming site but YouTube. You can often extend that principle to other elements of these blends.
As Hopkins notes astutely: "The real question for Real Estate websites is whether (and when) property listings will be included in the search engine results page on Google.com." The search engines have plenty of alibis handy for their land grab behaviors -- for example, they've built out a variety of metasearch and aggregation models (such as Google Video and Yahoo Video) that offer due credit to a variety of third party providers. But the real power comes from that first page of SERP's -- the ones we keep such close watch on with heat maps and Google Analytics referral statistics (when they do refer traffic downstream, that is). Google isn't sending you from Google.com to some other provider of news headlines; it's sending you to Google News.
The powerful utility of the new tools tends to soften the fact that the major search engines are essentially moving back to a walled garden concept reminiscent of the old AOL, minus the wall and the subscription fee.
In the meantime, data providers are left with difficult choices: do I give all of this data/power to large centralized players with little hope of a formal agreement, let alone any explicit conversation or setting of positive expectations about outcomes? (In the tradition of Google Base and the public relations strategy around that: "Here it is. It's really important. Go nuts.") It's this ambiguity that has led more observers to refer to Google as little more than another "scraper site".
Ironically, such accusations are sometimes levelled by the purveyors of similar quasi-scraper schemes. It takes one to know one. In real estate as in so many verticals, any land grab is going to be reminiscent of a scene from Goodfellas. Arguably, though, sites like Zillow have made great headway in connecting personably and directly with homeowners; encouraging them to voluntarily join in an information exchange and convincing them persuasively of that benefit. Google has done nothing of the sort.
At the end of the day, I think (hope?) the search engines recognize the dangers inherent in leaving originating data sources and content providers devoid of traffic and income, so it is a matter of how much traffic they continue to send along to third party vertical players, rather than being an all-or-nothing scenario. Taken too far, companies that purport to be dialed into their core competency in "search" -- the implied mission being to send traffic downstream to originating content providers who've made heavy investments in content and community -- would morph back into walled-garden, AOL-thinking portals.Labels: google, universal search
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Friday, July 03, 2009
 Really, it's not becoming my favorite thing to name names in headlines. But in light of Mr. Fulgoni's deliberate (if lighthearted) provocations of online "direct response" lovers, we must fight fire with fire. Or at least, on this statutory holiday, fireworks with fireworks.
When I read that comScore founder Gian Fulgoni yesterday told eMarketer that the "preoccupation with direct response" is "partly a response to so many young people being involved in Internet advertising," I nearly fell off my Big Wheel.
I suggest a different reason for clicks and sales conversions as key metrics in the marketing and advertising industry: they're objective. Much like:
- The radar gun that tells the police officer you've been driving 20mph over the limit, in response to your opening salvo: "...but I was just having a nice, zippy day."
- The 7.5 second time in the 40-metre dash that tells the college coaches that your son has zero chance to become a wide receiver at that level, let alone the pros, as opposed to "my boy has a big heart -- as big as they come!";
- The growth in net profit that helps investors decide whether or not to buy Comscore (SCOR) stock;
- The thermometer and hygrometer that tell your furnace, air conditioner, and dehumidifier/humidifier when to turn on and off;
- Countless other measures of obvious stuff.
If measures of "brand lift" also prove useful, then so be it. But the interest in measuring the more obvious stuff didn't get dreamt up by some imaginary cabal of literal-minded rave-going Youth. Rather, it appears to be an unholy alliance among people called Clients (the ones with the dollars to spend on more measurable digital media channels, who by the way got burned by brand-speak in Bubble I in 1998-2000); Web Analysts and the inventors of tracking methods, software, etc.; and Customers (who often use online tools like search and classifieds to avoid being bombarded with off-topic commercial messages). The Designers of the Medium Itself (eg. Tim Berners-Lee) and the surfing tools people use to access the medium (eg. Lynx, Netscape) created something called Standards and Conventions that created Expectations in Users, later codified and explicated by the Usability Gods.
Performance-based media? Clients ask for it by name. Customers don't shrink from it. Perhaps that's why upwards of 60% of online ad spend goes to the combination of search and classifieds/local.
If we're going to tout the benefits of "all of the other media that impact a person's psyche," then shouldn't we hold them to account as well as singing their praises -- specifically pointing to their enormous cost, and at least attempting to measure the benefit?
On a serious note: online, there is still a shortage of the types of quality places to engage customers, to start conversations, and to (without making them rebel) place decent "demand creation" messages. Then again, are we conceiving of "online" too narrowly? A celebrity touting a hot new camera will find herself on TV ads and billboards at the ball park. But in my mind, those are all potentially "digital, measurable, targeted, and auction-efficient" media channels.
Creating new kinds of (digital and measurable) demand-creation media spaces isn't as easy as it looks, perhaps because of the conventions and expectations cited above. Nor is it impossible. The Internet isn't TV. It really isn't. That does not, of course, mean that we should close off innovative conversations about what digital might become.Labels: comScore, metrics
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Monday, June 29, 2009
Back in 2007, we briefly reviewed the major M&A activity in the digital ad serving technology and digital agency spaces. Many of our panel observers felt that Google and Microsoft should immediately divest themselves of the agency parts of the DoubleClick/Performics and Aquantive/Razorfish acquisitions, to clear out some of the conflict of interest inherent in major agencies owned by the sellers of supposedly performance-based, impartial media platforms.
Google moved relatively quickly to divest itself of Performics, whereas Microsoft held onto the Razorfish business -- until now.
Amazingly, the $6 billion acquisition of Aquantive counted as Microsoft's biggest ever acquisition. Considering its size and clout, Razorfish (formerly Avenue A | Razorfish) has had a relatively quiet two years since then. Perhaps this can be chalked up to this mega-agency's DNA; its first go-round in Bubble 1.0 was in the fast-hiring, website-overbuilding, overvaluation heyday of 1995-2000. And the company still seems to favor slow-loading, expensive-to-build, semi-indexable pages. Like ALPO, a recent client win for Razorfish, could it be that Razorfish represents a previous era of overpackaged, overstrategized goods with the same old ALPO inside the can?
While some may ask why Microsoft is selling this business, Daily Finance reporter Douglas McIntyre proffers: "What it is doing with the company in the first place is anybody's guess."
Certainly, if the long delay in selling Razorfish was helpful in demonstrating that Microsoft's decision-making process was totally independent of industry opinion that they should divest sooner, the delay was effective. Unfortunately, the value of the asset may now be sharply reduced. But so are many assets... such as the parts of Yahoo Microsoft is still considering strategically partnering with or buying.Labels: msft, razorfish
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Microsoft has gotten us one step closer to the hard-line Traffick stance of jail time for click fraud. Making money by directly yanking money out of advertiser pockets in industries like auto insurance must have felt very good to these alleged fraudsters: until the day they were slapped with a $750,000 lawsuit. Ouch.Labels: click fraud
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
View Posts by Category |
