Google envy blinds Microsoft to the bigger opportunity

TalkBack 1 of 9:

Next »

• Thread View
• Flat View

The nature of advertising

The majority of on-demand revenues will come not from advertising but either from taking a slice of people's sales revenues (the Amazon.com and eBay model) or by providing services that help them operate more efficiently (the salesforce.com model). Google is not the model to follow, not until it manages to wean itself off its total dependence on advertising and expands into other services."

You're contradicting yourself. Advertising is, fundamentally, one of those "services that help them operate more efficiently."

The recent history of abusive "captive eyes" advertising by oligolopolies with little to differentiate themselves in the market besides slogans and pop-up ads completely overlooks the fact that a great deal of advertising is significant value as perceived by the customer. I, personally, have subscribed for years to trade magazines purely for the advertising content -- the editorial stuff was barely worth a glance.

The low perceived value of the mass-market ads is as much a matter of inadequate specificity as anything else (think spam -- viagra ads to my teenaged daughter?)

Google's business depends as much as anything on increasing the value of ads to the economy in general (both to buyers and sellers) by improving the signal/noise ratio. If they succeed, classical economic theory suggests that the net spend on advertising will increase, not decrease.

Time will tell.

Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 05/16/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now
• Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
• Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now