Is Google too powerful?
WordPress database error: [Unknown column 'pollq_multiple' in 'field list']
SELECT pollq_id, pollq_question, pollq_totalvotes, pollq_timestamp, pollq_expiry, pollq_multiple, pollq_totalvoters FROM wp_pollsq WHERE pollq_id = 3 LIMIT 1
By Greg Jarboe
For the April 9, 2007, cover story, Business Week’s Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Robert Hof asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “Is Google too powerful?”
Schmidt replied, “Too powerful relative to what?”
That’s a fair question.
So, let’s take a look at whether Google is too powerful relative to media companies, advertisers, and competitors.
According to Bloomberg Financial Markets, Google’s stock market capitalization is $144 billion. That gives the nine-year-old company a market value that is greater than Time Warner, Viacom, CBS and the New York Times Co. put together.
“It’s Google’s world,” Chris Tolles, the vice president of Topix, which runs Google ads on its local news search site, told Business Week. “We just live in it.”
If you think this makes the web giant too powerful relative to media companies, then vote “yes” in the blog survey below.
Advertisers shoveled some $10.6 billion into Google’s coffers last year, up an astonishing 73% from 2005. But, even some of Google’s customers complain that a pointedly opaque set of complex mathematical formulas leaves them to guess which ads work best and how much to pay for top placement.
“Yeah, they say they’re not evil, but you have to trust them,” Anil Kamath, chief technology officer at Efficient Frontier, which helps advertisers run search ad campaigns, told Business Week. “It’s difficult for advertisers to figure out what’s going on.”
If you think this makes Google’s phenomenal ad machine too powerful relative to advertisers, then vote “yes” below.
Finally, Google has an $11 billion hoard of cash and investments and the power to stifle competition. And there’s even cocktail party chatter in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., about whether the Google juggernaut needs to be reigned in by anti-trust regulators.
Jeremy Crane, director of the search group at Compete, told Business Week, “A lot of people are rooting for others to provide alternatives.”
If you think that this makes Universal Advertising Inc. too powerful relative to competitors, then vote “yes” in the blog survey below.
So, what are the alternatives?
One is creating something that has been called an advertising exchange or a media exchange for ads. A number of companies are working on creating ad exchanges including ContextWeb.
While I should disclose that ContextWeb is a client, I’m not being compensated for writing this blog post. I should also note that my blog post reflects one point of view, but the next blog post by Jay Sears of ContextWeb will express the exact opposite point of view.
We think an exchange of views is healthy – and we also agree that the new ad exchange coming from ContextWeb will be one of the alternatives that media companies and advertisers will want to check out. ContextWeb’s new advertising program works in conjunction with Google AdSense or other advertising networks.
In the next several weeks, the company will begin sending out invitations to participate in the beta program of ContextWeb’s revolutionary new exchange. Online publishers who have a serious interest in being able to set the CPM they want to earn should submit their email address here.
Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization and public relations firm. He is also a frequent speaker at Search Engine Strategies, PubCon, and other industry conferences.
| Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment. |
UPDATE: More Google Antitrust Issues from the Washington Post.
-- Guest Blogger
Sphere It