DoubleClick

Google, you have a problem. The verdict of your biggest customers is in -- and you've been found guilty of not pursuing your clients' best interests.

• The ANA, the nation's largest association of advertisers and marketers representing ~9,000 brands, just wrote the DOJ formally recommending that the DOJ oppose the Google-Yahoo advertising partnership as anti-competitive.  

I have two big takeaways for you:

Google's dominance of the Internet's business model for monetizing content only grows.

Knol, Google's newly announced online publishing service, is an ominous direct competitive threat to traditional newspaper/magazine/journal publishers, NOT a challenge to Wikipedia as many in content circles naively and wishfully think.

Growth: 39% YoY revenue growth on a ~$20b base, in a slowing global economy is impressive. Hats off to Google. Lots of network effects at work as Google sites revenue grew 42% YoY.

Tone: I did note the slightest whif of humility this quarter that external factors had some effect on Google's business, in stark contrast to last quarter's more bold statement that Google saw no effect of the external market or economy on Google's business.  

DoubleClick: As I suspected, CEO Schmidt said in an answer to a question, that Doubleclick was going well but that he would not break out any information -- in Google's well-established sorry-Charlie-style... no insight or guidance for you... The only thing interesting that was said about DoubleClick was indirect, in that Sergey Brin said that the big problem in display is that it is highly-fragmented." Couple that with CEO Schmidt indicating that Google was only months away fom offering a one-stop advertising solution, one can surmise that Doubleclick will indeed prove to be a material growth kicker to help Google fight off some of the natural drag of the law of large numbers.  

Kudos to Danny Dover's tremendous seomoz.org post: "The evil side of Google? Exploring Google's user data collection" where he comprehensively assembles all the types of personally-sensitive-information that Google routinely collects on Internet and Google users.

• Mr. Dover also exhibits exceptional clarity of thought in describing Google as "first and foremost a data company" despite conventional wisdom that describes Google as a search engine company or despite Google's description of themselves...as a technology company. 

Why is J. Edgar Hoover/J. Edgar Google an apt analogy? 

In entering the web measurement business for free, Google is literally killing many birds with one stone -- ComScore, Nielsen, Google's third party accountability, and any notion that Google does not have a badly conflicted business model. 

The Wall Street Journal article by Emily Steel: "Google to offer tool to measure web hits" is a solid and illuminating article that starts to get at the serious conflicts of interest at work here.

First, did any of you connect the dots that Google's press leak crushed ComScore's stock today (which is down over 20% at this writing) ... the same ComScore that investors used to drive Google's stock down in 1Q08 out of fear that click rates were down with the economy?

Drake Bennett of Boston Globe did a great job of highlighting some fresh new concerns about Google's extraordinary influence that I had not heard before -- see "Stopping Google."

• Here's the conclusion of the piece in order to encourage you to read the whole article:
  • "But there is a reason "Google" has become a verb: Google has so outpaced its rivals that it has begun to look like a monopoly, a necessity where users have only one real option. And the more we come to rely on Google, the more Google may have to listen to the rest of us."

In thinking about my recent post about how Google Adwords now formally discriminate against slower-loading sites by raising their minimum bidding price, I realized that small businesses and the "long tail" are probably most hurt the most by Google's new "quality score" policy.

• As I previously explained, Google has a subjective, non-transparent, non-auditable, or non-appealable "quality score" variable whose purpose is to maximize Google's revenue -- not to award the keyword to the highest bidder.

This new Google policy discriminates most heavily against small businesses because they:

Pablo Palatnik, an online marketing expert, recently launched his own blog, the Palatnik Factor which I recommend; Pablo is also a contributing writer for the Search Engine Journal -- which is where I came accross his work when he wrote a dead on piece questioning "Google Adword's Quality score: affilitates worst nightmare." 

• Because of that post, I reached out to Pablo with my post: "Why a lack of openness sullies the integrity of Google's ad auctions," and he posted it with a comment.  

A couple of my recent pieces are particularly relevant to online marketers:

http://www.precursorblog.com/content/why-not-a-marketer-bill-rights-google-yahoo-cartel

Google AdWords announced a new net neutrality double-standard that may also be an anti-competitive practice, in that Google will start discriminating against slower-loading websites by charging them higher prices.