Results tagged “GOOG”

I've been saying Silicon Valley has turned into media valley for more than two years. So it is good to have some backing.

Today at a fascinating VC panel, Roger McNamee, one of the top Silicon Valley investors, said Silicon Valley is doing great (despite the lack of exit strategies, and a mediocre IPO market.)

"For the first time, Silicon Valley is now represented in every form of media except television," he said.

About two years ago on a visit to New York, I wrote that someone should tell Mayor Bloomberg that the center of the media industry is moving to Silicon Valley and the West Coast. Because Google, Yahoo, EBay, (and now YouTube, FaceBook, etc) are all media companies.

New York is very cool partly because of its large media industry. The largest news and magazine companies have a heavy presence in midtown where I was staying. You can't avoid seeing their ticker tape news headlines whirl around their buildings, and their giant logos at night.

My alma mater, the Financial Times US HQ is there, and so are large offices of Reuters, CNN, Time-Warner, Hearst, etc.

But it's a shame that the center of the media industry has moved to Silicon Valley and nobody told New York :-)

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/09/a_report_from_n.php

GOOG, YHOO, EBAY, etc, publish pages of content with advertising around it. They are not technology companies, they are technology-enabled media companies.

Yes, GOOG et al would rather not represent themselves as media companies because they republish content for free from media companies. Media companies will let a "technology" company do this but not another media company...

...

Please see:

A Report From New York City...
September 2005

Silicon Valley has become Media Valley - someone should tell NYC Feb 2007.

Microsoft's acquisition late last week of the AdECN advertising exchange is a smart move. I interviewed Bill Urschel, the founder of AdECN earlier this year.

It is a company that has quietly managed to establish itself as a major real-time exchange for trading online advertising. It is a market that is very difficult to break into once first mover advantage is established because scale and liquidity are the most important attributes for the success of any exchange.

Mr Urschell said that there is probably only room for about three ad exchanges.

A neutral MSFT

An important aspect of AdECN is that it is neutral, it is not competing with advertising networks for ads, it trades the ads themselves, linking buyers and sellers, along with demographic, regional, and time-based delivery of advertising.

This neutral model could be a feather in MSFT's cap because Google is competing with its own publisher network. Advertising on Google's own sites has climbed to 64 percent of total revenues when it used to be evenly split with third-party publishers.

MSFT's AdECN exchange combined with its ad server technology could position MSFT as a preffered advertising partner for some publishers because it is not a direct competitor.

- MSFT recently won a major client, Digg, the community powered news aggregator.

- MSFT recently won EA, the world's largest gaming software company, to serve ads in online games.

MSFT is less of a competitor

- MSFT's own sites aren't doing that well, so it could claim that its own sites aren't competing against its publishing partners.

- In contrast: GOOG's own web sites grew 9 per cent in revenues in the most recent three months compared with no growth over the same period for its partner sites - GOOG 2Q 2007.

- Microsoft could sweeten deals with aggressive revenue sharing offers. It could potentially pay out more than 100 per cent of advertising revenues to publishers.

Google and Yahoo have tied up some of the largest online publishers into multi-year deals, however, most of the publishers in their ad networks can leave at anytime. Billions of dollars in online advertising revenues could switch to MSFT in an instant from GOOG and YHOO. It is a huge vulnerability for those companies.

A bonanza for publishers?

A battle for online publishers among GOOG, YHOO and MSFT could result in a bonanza for content producers. The revenue sharing agreements would favor the publishers and it could help some struggling newspapers and magazines.

...and the rapid fall of the East Coast Media

Advertising agencies have become the prime target of the Internet giants in their most recent M&A activities.

It is all part of the roll-up in the industry, as Sramana Mitra describes it well.

It is also a way for GOOG, YHOO, and MSFT to acquire advertising agencies as part of their inevitable move up the value chain.

The goal in these acquisitions is not the technology but the revenues and customers. Why split revenues with advertising agencies? Especially if you know how much advertising content you can publish in the months ahead. And you have the computing platforms to scale the advertising content much more efficiently.

It is much better to acquire those companies because:

• You recover the share of ad revenues paid to the advertising agencies.
• You also buy the customers. And those customers are going to be increasing their online advertising spend dramatically as they finish up with advertising contracts elsewhere.

These are easy numbers to crunch for the CFOs and justify the valuations of the deals.

But the Internet giants will face challenges:

• These are more people based businesses than they are technology based.  They don't scale nearly as well as servers-and-software. Google and the others know how to grow through servers-and-software but not through people.
• Managing the advertising businesses is going to require skills in managing relations that are nothing like software developer relations. Managing those businesses well and not killing them will be a challenge.
• Their market valuations might come under pressure if their cost of business rises because of the people-scaling factor and impacts operating margins.

The Rise of the West Coast Media

This is all part of a larger trend as the new media companies of the West Coast grow in value, while the old media companies of the East Coast cutback and shrink.

GOOG, YHOO, EBAY, AMZN, and MSFT are all publishers. They publish pages of content and advertising. Some of it is subscription based, some of it is advertising supported. These are technology-enabled media companies.

Our West Coast media companies are growing by leaps and bounds. The East Coast media companies are shrinking.

---

Advert: The New Lenovo ThinkPad is here! A short review.

Additional:

Silicon Valley has become Media Valley - someone should tell NYC

 Silicon Valley is rapidly turning into Media Valley--and New York, NY should look out--the capital of the media world is shifting about 3,000 miles westwards. Some of Silicon Valley's largest companies are media companies: Google, Yahoo, EBay, for example are...

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 24, 2007 5:18 PM

The acceleration in the disruption of media

I'm often invited to talk to groups of people about what's going on in the media sector, and I often start with a simple observation: At no other point in our lives will we be witness to such a...

Posted by Tom Foremski on November 22, 2006 3:53 AM

Cherry picking advertising and not paying for the journalism

Google can sell advertising for much less because it doesn't have to pay for any journalism. Newspapers, TV and radio sell advertising so that they can pay for the journalism. Craigslist can operate a global classified ads business with...

Posted by Tom Foremski on May 17, 2006 2:17 AM

What happens if the old media dies too soon? The urgent need for solid online news media business models

Exploring the new media business models

Posted by Tom Foremski on November 14, 2005 7:00 AM

Notes from Search]ology:

I'm at Google's Search]ology event for media, at the Googleplex, for presentations showing that search is still very important to the company. Last week Google announced its new tag line: Search, Ads and Apps and so it wants to make sure it is not drifting away from search.

Search is not spoken about much, "We are a victim of our own success," said Elliott Schrage, Head of Global Communications. We are promised a peak at new search technologies.

So far, the two morning sessions have been numbingly boring, Search 101 for kindergardners. We got to know about pagerank and the importance of links...(!)

Craig Silverstein, Technology Director, and Google employee #1 talked about early Google history, how it was set up in a dorm room, etc, nothing new.

Ben Gomes, software engineer and Kerry Rodden, senior user experience researcher talked about how the first two results on a search are very important and have to be highly relevant(what happened to finding the one most relevant result?).

Then they talked about importance of links, etc. And how a spell checker improves search results.

Udi Manber, VP Engineering, on the Next Step in Evolution of Search: Some basic examples of "not what you say but what you mean." Queries figure out chances of results matching the query (is it Bayesian?).

Mr Manber is now juggling oranges and apples to demonstrate how GOOG has to compare like with like...(!) And compare against different types of media, it is a difficult problem...

Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience:
Five minutes about how wonderful and smart Craig Silverstein is.... She tells us that search should be easy, intuitive, simple.

We have two steps that make search even simpler...

We are announcing universal search instead of seperate search engines. (Technorati has already been offering this kind of capability...)

Here is a demo, I'm a huge fan of Steve Jobs...

Next demo: Nosferatu. Here you can watch the entire movie on Google Video...

Next deom: I have a dream. See the video of Dr. King... (Seems not about universal search but about video next to search...)

More and more video examples from YouTube...

New Scoring Function!!! (Just mentioned briefly but this means PageRank is changed because of Universal Search!) We have a new algorithm, and it is based on personalisation.
(This is bad news for SEO'ers trying to get their clients on the first page of results because now, with Universal Search, the page results are crowded out by video, news, blogs, and other results!)

Next announcement: Google Experimental, allows signups and automatically keeps users logged in on future visits...

Now a Q&A panel and Sergey Brin is up on the panel along with the others...

I ask about personalisation data and ethical issues in countries such as China...

Ms Mayer says users can look at their entire search history and see what information Google has about users. And yes, ethical issues are considered. Mr Manber says personalisation data is personal in the aggregate not individually...(!)

It is now over, time for lunch. Overall, a very content-lite experience.

....
Add Info:

WHAT: Live webcast of Google's upcoming invitation-only Searchology™ press conference to be held at its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters.

WHEN: Wednesday, May 16th, 9:30am – 12:30pm PDT

WHERE: http://google.client.shareholder.com/visitors/event/build2/mediapresentation.cfm?MediaID=25550&Player=1

WHY: Google to highlight the latest news on search innovations. Featured speakers will include Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience; Udi Manber, VP of Engineering; and Craig Silverstein, Technology Director.

Search engines say they use complex algorithms to help users find exactly what they want. Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button (btw, does anybody use it?), right below the search box implies that very thing.

The legions of top Ph.Ds working for the search engines publish oodles of scientific papers on complex mathematical concepts related to search.

 Recent Papers Written by Googlers

• A complete, co-inductive syntactic theory of sequential control and state

• Achieving Anonymity via Clustering in a Metric Space

• An Assertional Correctness Proof of a Self-Stabilizing l-Exclusion Algorithm

• On-the-fly sharing for streamed aggregation

• Programmable clustering

• Using Many Machines to Handle an Enormous Error-Correcting Code

It all looks very impressive but it seems to have more to do with contributing to the mythology surrounding search--that it is very complex and scientific--than to the actual reality of how search is done.

From my vantage point as an online publisher, it is clear that search is increasingly "people-powered" rather than machine-powered. There are millions of people helping the searchbots find information.

Here are some examples and gripes:

- There are many publishers that try to make sure their headlines catch the attention of the search engines rather than catch the attention of readers. The same is true for content, editors increasingly optimize it for the search engines rather than the readers.

- Why should I have to tag my content, and tag it according to the specific formats that Technorati, and other search engines recommend?  Aren't they supposed to do that?

- Google relies on a tremendous amount of user-helped search. Websites are encouraged to create site maps and leave the XML file on their server so that the GOOGbot can find its way around.

- The search engines ask web site owners to mask-off parts of their sites that are not relevant, such as the comment sections with no-follow and no-index tags.

- Web sites are encouraged to upload their content into the Googlebase database. Nice--it doesn't even need to send out a robot to index the site.

- Every time I publish something, I send out notification "pings" to dozens of search engines and aggregators. Again, they don't have to send out their robots to check if there is new content.

- Google asks users to create collections of sites within specific topics so that other users can use them to find specific types of information.

- The popularity of blogs is partly based on the fact that they find lots of relevant links around a particular subject. Blogs are clear examples of people-powered search services.

And there are many more examples. If the search engines are so great at doing what they do, then how come we have to do all of the above?

I resent the fact that I have to create all this content describing my content--the search engines should be creating this "metadata."

I just want to write stuff,  and leave it up to the search engines to find it, classify it, index it, and do all the other things their mythology suggests that they do.

In the world of enterprise search, companies such as FAST, Vivisimo, Autonomy, etc, have to find information without the benefit of aids. Corporate documents have no pagerank or tags or much metadata of any kind.

Yet in consumer search it seems as if nothing would be found without a huge amount of help from millions of people every day. Why is it that we have to help the search engines do a job they are supposed to be doing by themselves?

I wonder about the productivity cost to society from all this human labor--work that is supposed to be done by robots.

It's as if these searchbots are blind, and we have to lead them patiently along the street and point things out to them, while they tap away at the world with white canes.

...

Part 2: Search seems to be broken...

And by Richard Koman for Silicon Valley Watcher.

Yesterday my colleague Richard Koman wrote that a federal judge ruled that Google, Yahoo, Time Warner and Microsoft could refuse advertising.

 Search engines are constitutionally similar to newspapers, the decision says and they have the same limited First Amendment rights as newspapers to accept or reject advertising.

Link to:   Judge Google is a media company, legally speaking

Interesting. Google says it is not a media company yet it invokes legal protections granted to newspapers.

Here is Rachel Rosmarin from Forbes:

Is Google a media company? Its officials often skirt around the concept, for fear of offending potential partners or competitors.

Yet under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) Google and other search engine companies are not considered media companies and are protected from legal liabilities arising from what they publish--newspapers have no such shielding.

Could this recent legal ruling lead to the loss of CDA protection for Google and similar companies?

Richard commented:

That's interesting. This dismissal decision actually has it both ways. Google is given the free speech protections of a newspaper and the court cites Miami Herald (newspapers can't be required to print candidate responses to editorials), Daily Nebraskan (decision not to print gay ads protected as free speech), Associates & Aldrich Co (newspaper can't be  compelled to print ad as is; right to edit).

At the same time, Google is an online service provider under CDA. So they are protected from the liability that newspapers have for the editorial decisions they make.

That's a sweet spot to be in. I think the thing to realize is that the First Amendment right not to speak is not a press freedom but a commercial freedom. The cases are newspaper cases because newspapers are traditional ad publishers. As an ad-running business, GOOG has the right not to run ads.

But they don't exercise any other editorial discretion, so they are very much an online provider. In fact, since all they do is aggregate others' content, they really have no editorial liability.

You could argue they should have a responsibility for the content they carry (ie Google News), but that's where CDA steps in to say: No liability.

But can Google have its cake and eat it?

Google News is produced by human editorial decisions--they are merely expressed in different ways, through the design of the Google News algorithm. Otherwise Google News would pick content at random and publish it, which it doesn't.

An ISP can argue that it is just a pipe, a bit carrier, and therefore has the protection of the CDA. However, the Telco/Cable ISPs want to climb up the value chain and add their own services, content, and advertising. Will they run into similar legal issues?

And If there is no net neutrality, and they are choosing which services/content to carry, could such editorial activities affect their DCA protection?

The Telco/Cable companies are government regulated which means they have some powerful friends.  My cell phone bill comes with 13 different taxes and fees, and my landline phone has nearly as many. That makes for a lot of government, state,  and regulatory agencies that are stakeholders in these businesses.

Or does being in a government regulated industry increase business risks? There is greater exposure to changes in political climates. And the will of the people can be expressed in unwelcome ways... 

Either way, I'm sure the newspaper publishers and their lawyers would love to have a more level playing field against Google and the rest--it costs them a lot of money to police media content.

A federal judge has dismissed a case against Google that challenged the search engine's right to refuse advertising. In his ruling (PDF), the judge handed Google, Yahoo and Microsoft a big fat juicy win, saying that search engines can refuse advertising for any reason - and they don't have to say why.

The plaintiff, Christopher Langdon, was suing Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Time Warner and AOL for refusal to run his ads. The complaint focused mainly on Google and its refusal to specify the reason for the rejection.

In essence, the judge answered the topic that's been tearing up these pages this week: Is Google a media company? Simply, yes. Search engines are constitutionally similar to newspapers, the decision says and they have the same limited First Amendment rights as newspapers to accept or reject advertising.

Eric Goldman has an excellent review of the decision. He highlights the main points.

• Search engines have a First Amendment right to reject ads as part of their protected right to speak or not (see Miami Herald v. Tornillo). This opinion is consistent with the uncited Search King ruling, although that case framed Google's Page Rank as protected opinion.

• Search engine decisions to reject ads is protected by [the Communications Decency Act] as a legitimate decision to filter "otherwise objectionable" content. The court concludes that "Section 230 provides Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft immunity for their editorial decisions regarding screening and deletion from their network." I'm expecting the KinderStart judge to protect Google's ranking choices under 230(c)(2) as well. (In case you're wondering, we're still waiting for the KinderStart ruling that was promised by the end of 2006.)

• Search engines aren't state actors and are not bound by the First Amendment, so they do not deprive advertisers (such as Langdon) of First Amendment rights by rejecting their advertising. This opinion is consistent with at least a dozen other cases holding that private IAPs and websites aren't state actors.
  

In finding for Google, the court said that the First Amendment protects not only the right to speak but the right not to speak and cited three newspaper cases that protect a publisher's right to refuse advertising. Indeed, search engines are in an even stronger position than publications, because while newspapers face liability claims for what they publish (such as libel claims), "online service providers" to not. That's because of the Communications Decency Act, which explicitly "forbids the imposition of publisher liability on a service provider for the exercise of its editorial and self-regulatory functions." (Ben Ezra, Weinstein Inc. v AOL, 206 F.3d. 980.)

In the future, search engines need not worry about giving explanations to every advertiser it rejects. The ruling makes clear they can now reject without explanation.

This will save Google time and frustration--they can just invoke that standard sign over the cash register: We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone," says Dana Todd, president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization and co-founder of SiteLab, a search engine marketing agency.

So the bottom line, says media and tech attorney Jon Hart, according to Forbes:

Next time, the defendant will pull up a copy of this opinion. Google is not the public square, it is a media company."

The San Francisco WiFi deal with Google and Earthlink has run into more problems: (Hat tip Kimo Crossman)

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/aclu-puts-heat-on-earthlink-and-google-in-san-fran/2007-02-08

ACLU puts heat on Earthlink and Google in San Fran

February 8, 2007 · In: Wi-Fi | Wireless Regulation

As if Earthlink and Google aren't getting enough heat over their muni-WiFi project in San Francisco. The ACLU of Northern California told the city's Board of Supervisors that its contract with Earthlink and Google doesn't have enough privacy and speech protections when it comes to the information Earthlink and Google will collect and share about end users. The contract doesn't have any limits on what kind of information Earthlink will collect, while the terms for Google call for requiring "minimal" information on login without defining what minimal means. The ACLU also said customers should be able to opt in or out of any service that collects data on what they look at on the Internet, and no provisions exist.

For more about the ACLU's concerns in San Francisco:
- read this article from InfoWorld

----

More here from WebProNews, and here from Light Reading.

 

http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_strategy/more_trouble_ahead_for_googles_sf_wifi_plan.html

FAST Search and Transfer has suddenly popped into my sphere of attention and I mean really popped. I got to spend some time at FAST's user conference at the end of last week, and it was an educational experience that got me interested in search again.

This Norwegian based enterprise software search company has made the subject of search compelling again. For too long GOOG has made it appear as if it had already won the search wars--anything better would be an incremental improvement.

Yet enterprise search--which is where FAST has staked its expertise--is a much more interesting subject than I imagined, and much more interesting than consumer search. Enterprise search is much more difficult problem, and one of the most challenging problems in IT.

Consumer search can be vague and still be successful. It can bring up a list of nearly relevant sites or documents, and usually that is all that is needed. But in the enterprise, search is usually needed to find something very specific, a contract, a purchase order, a memo. 

And there are all sorts of conditions associated with access to data, some security based, others are regulatory. Search quickly becomes quite a complex process and one that can lead to other things.

Enterprises use a lot of structured data, but there is also a massive amount of unstructured data too. Search in the enterprise could potentially bring the two data world's together.

You might even be able to create enterprise applications by using modified search algorithms.

This type of scenario gets very interesting: enterprise applications by algorithm. This is already happening in business intelligence, I wonder how far, in theory, such an approach could be taken. Could you create CRM applications through search algorithms?

I'll be writing more about this subject, and FAST, over the next few days.

Susan Feldman, a senior analyst at IDC, will release on Friday the results of a groundbreaking study that shoots down one of the largest myths in search engine marketing: that the majority of traffic to web sites comes from the top ten search engines.

By comparing publicly available traffic data from companies such as Nielsen Research, with research of its own, IDC found a big discrepancy in terms of the number of search queries tracked. Ms Feldman said, "Our model showed that there were seven to ten times more search queries being made and that the large search engines had only about 30 per cent of the search query traffic."

Ms Feldman said that the missing search queries, the dark matter of the search engine world, were coming from direct queries. People would go to a web site such as Amazon.com and type in a search query.

"This means that there is a massive business opportunity still to be had. The top search engines do not own the web, at least yet," said Ms Feldman.

The IDC results will be released at a Friday session at a conference organized by Fast Search & Transfer, a client of IDC and a vendor of search enterprise software. Earlier this week Fast introduced its AdMomentum product which allows online publishers to set up their own advertising networks instead of sharing revenues with Google, Yahoo or other ad networks.

. . .

Foremski's Take: The IDC findings are not a revelation for any online publisher. Peeking into the server logs reveals where traffic is coming from. For example, SVW gets less than 5 per cent of its traffic from search sites, and that is great because my traffic is not "surfer" it knows where I live and comes in direct. Yet, the bandwidth used by the search engine robots is one third of my total--to serve less than five per cent of my visitors.

The IDC numbers will help to dispel one of the big myths about the Internet, that the search engines drive substantial amounts of traffic therefore sites need to optimize for the search engines.

I've long said: optimize for your customers/readers not for the search engines. SEO, beyond basic principles, is not worth it, yet many companies spend a lot of money making their sites searchbot friendly rather than user friendly.

- - -
Additional Info:

Fast Forward conference blog

Fast Forward Conference Agenda

SVW:

The lie of distribution--search engines return very little value to news/blog sites yet hog bandwidth and increase server loads

GOOG: give us your content for free!

craigslist: Battling the bot armies

The lie of distribution

Posted by Tom Foremski on October 26, 2005 5:51 AM

FAST Search and Transfer, the European based search giant, today announced software that allows online publishers to serve contextual ads to their readers.

The FAST AdMomentum software could increase ad revenues by more than 200 per cent for some publishers, compared with large advertising networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network.

This is a software package installed in a publisher's data center. FAST says that it could also be used by a third party to offer a ready made online contextual advertising network that could be used to service many smaller online publishers such as blog networks. This means it could be used to compete with up and coming advertising networks such as FM Advertising, and AdBrite.

Publishers collect between 30 per cent to 70 per cent of the revenues that their advertising network partners receive--an amount that varies according to each deal. Google doesn't disclose the revenue split.

With AdMomentum, large publishers can establish their own advertising networks that support contextual ads, and also offer a wide variety of other types of advertising revenue such as impressions, pay per click, and also auctions.

Advertisers have a self-service interface and the software API is compatible with current advertisement tracking tools.

More than a dozen large publishers around the world have been beta testing the software.

Perry Solomon, VP of strategic market development at FAST, told SVW: "AdMomentum can be used to target ads to specific groups of people. One of our customers in Norway is using it to target ads to people on a street by street basis."

"This is a way for publishers to capture the share of the revenues that have been going to the advertising networks," he added. "The publishers already have advertisers, and they have the content, they don't need the advertising networks. We can provide them with a revenue engine."

Nearly one-half of Google's revenues in the past, have come from its AdSense network, which serves advertising on sites owned by online publishers. Large publishers such as New York Times, Knight-Ridder, and Time-Warner use AdSense.

Foremski's Take: This is potentially a game changing product and it brings back the advertiser relationship to the publisher--where it belongs.

For example, I've always wondered why the New York Times would run AdSense on its online front page, and the AdSense ads carry a text link at the bottom "advertise on this site." That says to everyone "we have no clue how to monetise this space and have handed over the customer relationship to a third party." That is suicide in today's world.

The advertising networks take a huge cut considering that they establish self-service advertising interfaces and run a bunch of servers and some software. Well, now the publishers can now do the same and cut out the middleman.

I can also see AdMomentum being used by local newspapers to essentially become the "AdSense" for their regions. They could sign up smaller online publishers within their local towns and neighborhoods and provide a much better targeted service to businesses and residents.

Additional Info:

FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the ticker symbol 'FAST' on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The FAST Group operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, Asia, Australia, the Americas, and the Middle East.  For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.