Google Expanding in All Directions
As both an SEO and a Google shareholder, I have a love hate relationship with the company. More recently I have been feeling love when buying up shares of their stock, especially seeing how they are still buying marketshare while competitors are downsizing.
Increased Monetization
Google has been showing more ads on search results, and accidentally leaked some AdWords click volume numbers for Cyber Monday.
Google paid click volume was also up, year over year, in categories like Department Stores (39%), Books & Magazines (28%), Comparison shopping (25%) and Sports & Fitness (24%). Even categories like Apparel (9%) and Home Furnishings (14%) were up.
They recently announced they are accepting ads promoting hard alcohol, have started running credit card arbitrage ads on their own network, and created an additional chunk of targeted inventory by allowing advertisers to target ads to the iPhone and G1.
New Distribution Channels
Google is buying marketshare for their browser, which is soon to leave beta (so Google can start doing bundling deals). I recently saw this ad on the New York Times
How many more Chrome ads will we see across the AdSense network in the coming months, especially when considering that the Google brand is still cherished AND most brand ad rates have dropped sharply over the past couple months.
And some Google computers have the OS stripped off their user agent string, leading to some speculation that they might be working on creating an operating system or a more advanced infrastructure to build network applications on. The also released their native client, aiming to allow web browsers to interact with client computer resources.
Google just created a ton more inventory on YouTube by placing a search box on syndicated videos. And they just made their database deeper and more valuable by indexing a lot of archived magazine content.
Comments
It's still the Achilles heel of Google that they rely almost completely on advertising for revenue. Plastering ads everywhere is going to boost their revenue in the short-term but it's also a sign they still don't have any other serious revenue stream. So what's their plan next year? Even more ads?
When they allow unrestricted ads on pills, porn & gambling is when I know they've totally sold out.
After reading this last night, I was working on one of my sites and noticed a Adsense ad promoting "Adult Tube Site"...
It is becoming more and more obvious. First the browser market,then they are going for the heart of the beast- operating system market.
Everything that they do, excluding the ppc ads and their new models of usage, is geared towards preparing the ground for the operating system.
Who wants to bet?
Rabbit
Why is Google advertising in the New York Times? If I were a stockholder, I would seriously be pissed. They're wasting people's money. Everything that google has ever done has spread by word of mouth. I found out chrome was available 10 seconds after they opened up for downloads, because I heard by word of mouth. Since then I've convinced numerous people to try it and almost all of them love it. If Google wants some suggestions of how to spend their money I'd be happy to provide some insight. How about using it to make Chrome for Mac's. Jees how long is that going to take already. Honestly the New York Times? When was the last time anyone paid attention to an ad in the New York Times? That's just a silly waste of money.
I think they are really going to try to buy massive marketshare. Part of that will be a fast product, but part of it will be making people want to try another service. Part of that is going to come down to using advertising to build the perception of superiority.
They also launched Adsense For Domains:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100301
oh wow...nice.
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