Unlikely... the bulk of their revenue is based on ad payments, either on search or on individual sites. I'd guess it's probably 70:30 roughly, since you're probably almost as likely to search on google first and click a couple results. So they'd probably take a 30% hit just from loss of ads. Behavioral information from starting from a google search should also not be under-estimated which is probably where they get a lot of their behavioral data from to begin with (you searched for X, went to Y for Z seconds, etc).
adsense, analytics and search are all pillars of their core income sources, if you take one out, the value is seriously impacted overall.
I can’t imagine keyword search on third-party sites is responsible for a significant share of overall AdSense revenue, I wonder if it’s even a single digit percentage of their overall ad inventory?
Single digit percent of Google's overall ad inventory
would be $1bn-$10bn per annum, at current scale. Google's ad business is big. Over 10 years...
One of the first "tricks" you learn on adowrds is to turn off (it's hard to find) "search partners," or at least split it off and quarter your bids. It's on by default and'll take up a surprising amount of your budget, using default settings.
I wouldn't be surprised if it ads up to a meaningful share of the "search ads" market.
Exactly. Google already knows a shit ton about you, and given how data driven they are, I guarantee they came to the conclusion that they would still be able to show highly targeted ads with little or no loss in revenue or click-through-rates rates. Heck, dollars to donuts they've already A/B tested the shit out of it to reach this conclusion.
Ultimately I think it decreases google's value as a search engine (to the user searching) by a very small amount, but nets them a high immediate return. I bet it's hard to quantify the net effect over time, and it would be a really hard sell internally to not allow it.
I've noticed the quality of google search decrease drastically over the last 15+ years or so. I don't think that's directly tied to ad buys though.
and my guess is that Google will only roll out improved search results when the cost to the company is great enough to justify the loss of income.
It is a publicly traded company, I don't think Google can just cut out millions of dollars of revenue from their bottom line because they want to not be evil - the shareholders would probably ask for people's heads on platters.
Of course only Google knows the extent of which their income-from-spam is, but I imagine it is significant otherwise they would have solved that problem already as the interest in Duck Duck GO, Blekko and Bing/Yahoo continues to rise/be-discussed-more (Don't know if the ACTUAL usage suggests that people are doing more than just talking or moving over to using different services full time)
and I have had a hard time trying to find an article that was written 2 years ago about the data centers around the globe that Google has built. The scale is unbelievable of each installation and there are something like 30 around the globe right now:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/11/map-of-all-google-data-c...
More than nefarious under-dealings, I think this situation literally snuck up on Google and by the time the publicly-traded company had algorithms to determine the extent of the shenanigans, they realized it would have a noticeable effect on their bottom line if they simply culled all those results out in one day.
They are either going to roll out changes in stages and slowly increase the quality while keeping an eye on what that does to Adsense income and really publicize each change so they rebuild trust with all of us, or they will respond heavy-handidly in a year or so with a "new algorithm change" that "online publishers are up in arms about!" again.
My guess is on the slow-and-gradual approach with a big publicity boost so we are shown they care and are working on it Matt Cutts-style :)
While I've noticed the lagging quality in their search, I still use the Big-G... it's fast for me and gives me accurate results. Then again I mostly search for tech, if I was searching for weight loss, health, sex, appliances or any other topic that is DOMINATED by ads, I would have given up and gone back to using a damn phone book a while ago.
While you’re probably right, this isn’t super relevant. From Google’s perspective, they just want to auction off the advertising slot and get that view, the actual click through rate on that ad is a secondary issue.
And the vast majority of their ad money, comes from ads that show on searches. So if they lose search, they lose the ads too. So their money is in search.
I think this is largely misunderstood about Google. It seems like ads placed in search results only accounts for a small portion of their revenue. Not sure how much the targeting of ads by analyzing your search history actually contributes either. I think Google just figured out how to scale online ad sales really well.
It doesn't look like it's affecting their search ads (or if it is, it's not fully down for them), so not the full advertising revenue of GOOG. But it's still likely tens of millions per hour.
Fwiw, at $DayJob we spend a substantial amount of money on Google ads and get reliable return of ~5% greater than the ad spend [ignoring repeat business].
Is that still the case? Do we know how much of Google's ad revenue is directly from their own search product? Obviously the genius of putting ads on a search engine is that it's a perfect fit: the users are literally typing in what they're interested in. But surely Google is also making big bucks now from ad products where this isn't the case (or is less so the case), like third-party web ads (AdSense) and mobile app ads (AdMob), as well as embedded ads in other Google products (like Gmail), and presumably those do rely heavily on tracking user behavior.
adsense, analytics and search are all pillars of their core income sources, if you take one out, the value is seriously impacted overall.
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