p2pnet news view | Advertising:-“There is some evidence we have been a little more aggressive in decreasing coverage than we should have been.”

That’s Google co-founder and semi-supremo Sergey Brin, quoted by the New York Times.

Translated, as the headline to the story says, it means, “Google Deliberately Sells Fewer Ads —- and May Have Gone Too Far.”

Fewer ads?  How can that be?

“Listening to Google’s executives on their conference call with investors Thursday afternoon, you’d never know that the company’s second-quarter results fell short of expectations and its shares plummeted 10 percent in after-hours trading,” says the story, going on:

“Since Google has chosen, as a matter of principle, not to offer any guidance in advance about what its sales and profits will be, it avoids any embarrassing questions if it misses its own marks. So Eric Schmidt, and other executives, blithely insisted that all was well.”

But, “Some of the softness” in Google advertising revenue was, “self-inflicted,” says the NYT, which has Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg saying the company, “had chosen to reduce is advertising coverage —- the percentage of Web pages on which it displays advertising —- to an all-time low.”

And according to Rosenberg, Google’s other co-founder and semi-supremo Larry Page, “would like to see even fewer ads,” although the New York Times observes, “Page was not on the conference call to speak for himself.”

Meanwhile Brin, “noted that Google developed technology that helped increase its revenue from advertising (largely by finding ads that are more interesting to users). Indeed, it had a rule of thumb that for every potential dollar the company could earn from an improvement in advertising revenue, it would reduce the number of pages showing ads so that Google would only earn 50 cents more in revenue.”

However, “Clearly that is not the ideal strategy, because we don’t want to end up with no ads,” Brin admits in the story.

No kidding.

. .Stumble It!

New York Times -Google Deliberately Sells Fewer Ads — and May Have Gone Too Far, July 17, 2008

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!

Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 7:21 am and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 4900 times