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Living Room / Re: Google in Sicko Storm - Welcome to democracy google style
« Last post by mouser on July 02, 2007, 06:57 PM »I'm seeing an interesting phenomena happening with google..
Last year i got a call on my answering machine from google, wanting to talk to me about "an opportunity for a collaboration between google and donationcoder"
When i called back, very curious to hear about this collaboration, i discovered that the caller was a google salesperson and the "collaboration" idea was to put adsense ads on our site. hah! what an exciting collaboration.
What is happening with google is that it is becoming 2 companies in one. A part of the company is developing cool technical stuff, and probably couldn't care less about advertising. Then there is the huge machinery of google advertising, whose job is to game the rest of the google machine in order to make huge revenue from advertising sales. Basically the google sales people are doing the search-engine optimization tricks in order to try to get advertisers ads *on google* to have higher placement, etc.
I guess television and magazines have the same kinds of pressures between their advertising and editorial divisions. It just seems more dangerous to me when it's happening on our internet, and when small changes in the kinds of results google returns for searches can have such a huge impact, and it means their are huge internal pressures for google to favor sites that advertise with them.
To me it feels like a conflict of interest. If a company is going to so completely dominate the web search gateway we all use, they shouldn't be profiting from sending you to specific sites that run advertising with them. Note that I'm not suggesting their should be a legal rule against this, only that I don't think it's ethical or a good idea, and I'd prefer to use a search company whose profits do not depend on sending me to sites that pay them money. The only problem is that the entire web is more and more moving to an advertising-revenue system, and it's just become accepted that nearly everything on the web should be free and make money by creating a ton of users and selling them advertising.
Question for the economists: Is it possible that one day in the near future there will be no more actual products to buy, and everything just becomes free and funded by advertising? i.e. your computer and monitor are now free, but have ads on the side of them? Or does there eventually have to be at least one object in the universe that you have to buy in the end? Maybe in the future each person will have 1 and only 1 thing to buy in their lifetime, a "uniwidget" and all other things are free but come with advertising for uniwidgets?
Last year i got a call on my answering machine from google, wanting to talk to me about "an opportunity for a collaboration between google and donationcoder"
When i called back, very curious to hear about this collaboration, i discovered that the caller was a google salesperson and the "collaboration" idea was to put adsense ads on our site. hah! what an exciting collaboration.
What is happening with google is that it is becoming 2 companies in one. A part of the company is developing cool technical stuff, and probably couldn't care less about advertising. Then there is the huge machinery of google advertising, whose job is to game the rest of the google machine in order to make huge revenue from advertising sales. Basically the google sales people are doing the search-engine optimization tricks in order to try to get advertisers ads *on google* to have higher placement, etc.
I guess television and magazines have the same kinds of pressures between their advertising and editorial divisions. It just seems more dangerous to me when it's happening on our internet, and when small changes in the kinds of results google returns for searches can have such a huge impact, and it means their are huge internal pressures for google to favor sites that advertise with them.
To me it feels like a conflict of interest. If a company is going to so completely dominate the web search gateway we all use, they shouldn't be profiting from sending you to specific sites that run advertising with them. Note that I'm not suggesting their should be a legal rule against this, only that I don't think it's ethical or a good idea, and I'd prefer to use a search company whose profits do not depend on sending me to sites that pay them money. The only problem is that the entire web is more and more moving to an advertising-revenue system, and it's just become accepted that nearly everything on the web should be free and make money by creating a ton of users and selling them advertising.
Question for the economists: Is it possible that one day in the near future there will be no more actual products to buy, and everything just becomes free and funded by advertising? i.e. your computer and monitor are now free, but have ads on the side of them? Or does there eventually have to be at least one object in the universe that you have to buy in the end? Maybe in the future each person will have 1 and only 1 thing to buy in their lifetime, a "uniwidget" and all other things are free but come with advertising for uniwidgets?
