Cam head for Google's controversial Street View (googlewatchblog.de)

Is Google totalizing the infosphere? Cam head for Google's controversial Street View (googlewatchblog.de)

Michael Arrington’s post made the point: Organize All The World’s Information, Then Put Google Ads On It

My comment there:

Google quietly changed from time to time. The “official mission” of organising the worlds information is no lie, but it is the half truth only, as you point out. Google is an advertising company – THE advertising company of the world.

I count it on my fingers. We will see perfectly contextual mobile advertsing FOR EVERYONE soon, for every local business – easy as an Adwords account – it will be an extension of it.

And there is still the dilemma at the core of the business model of Google: Do not make your search results too good to keep the click-through-rate high because this is just the source of revenue. Null sum dilemma. …

Some more musings about Google’s roadmap

Up to now the business model was primarily about online advertising. But exactly in which sense? The brilliance of the Google business model was to run “micro auctions” in the attention hungry attention economy (i.e. Adwords). Every big and small business searching desperately for the “customer one click away” competing with all the other businesses and products.

Ironically the Google search engine is a search engine for information only in an instrumental sense. Looking behind the glass of course you see it’s business purpose is to be a search engine to find customers. If you sometime have controled or managed an Adwords campaign this perspective is quit obvious. This are two sides of the same coin and others have pointed this out too: 

As competition for the best keywords increases, prices go up. Now that the (patented) system is in place, this takes virtually no investment on the part of Google. In this case, it is Google’s customers that are driving the increase in ad revenues for Google. If advertisers want search ad exposure, they have no choice but to pay. Another Reason Google’s Business Model Is Brilliant 

Of course this is a nice model for Google, especially since the company is so dominant in the market. I let Arrington speak again:

It’s unlikely Google will ever find another money machine as efficient as search advertising, which accounts for about 40% of the $40 billion advertising dollars spent online each year. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try. Today they unleashed two new forms of advertisements:click to buy links on YouTube and adsense for Flash games.

… Most people still think of Google as a search business. But what the analysts understood long ago, and the rest of us are realizing now, is that what they really want to do is organize all the world’s information, and then put ads on it. ( Organize All The World’s Information, Then Put Google Ads On It )

Android, Maps, Chrome, user’s data – twine it all together …

But now think about Android, Google Maps, Street View and the fact that Google knows your behavioral data like nobody else (they bought DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion (Wikipedia), and with Chrome there is a new frontline, the browser battle. See the possibilities? Think about revenue sharing when Google enables the click-to-buy in real life settings while you are on your way looking for a restaurant, cab or a movie. ( Think of Augemented Reality too.) That enabling of business is quite better than advertising, which is always only the preparation to business.

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