Steve Baker’s book, The Numerati, is about tracking and predicting people’s behavior based on their data, and so he and his publisher are taking a page from the book to try to target advertising for it.
Somewhat related: I recommend Cory Doctorow’s new short story, The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, an allegory for the age of tracking our data.
A few fascinating tidbits from Jim Cramer’s interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt today:
* Google accounts for 0.7 percent of GDP, according to Goldman Sachs.
* Cramer says the ad market is $600 billion and asks whether Google could get 10 percent of that. Schmid says, “Well, we could,” and then corrects him: It’s a trillion-dollar market globally.
* Schmidt says Google will make more on mobile than on desktops because mobile is more targeted and Google targets.
* GMail outage? “Taht was a screw up. We fixed that. We’re not perfect.”
* What would Google make by adding sponsorship to its home page? “Some number of billions od dollars.” Why not do it? “People wouldn’t like it. We prioritize the end-user over the advertiser… We’re not going to sell it.”
* Google is 52 percent international revenue; Schmidt thinks it will go to 65-35.
* About getting too big: “How do we behave? Not the way Microsoft did. I would never do that.
* “I never worry about Microsoft.”
Google’s hubris may have finally gotten the better of them. See this from the official Google blog about the launch of Knol, the Wikipedia-About.com-Associated-Content it just officially launched:
The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.
So Google is now going to fill in the gaps in human knowledge? That is its first hubristic leap. The next: that we need Google to create a means for sharing knowledge. That is what the internet itself does. Every page, every blog, post, every media article is precisely that.
So now Google is competing not just with media but with the entire internet and everyone who publishes on it.
This is terribly dangerous for Google. Obviously, since I’m writing a book called What Would Google Do?, I admire them and their self-awareness about their role on the internet. But this displays a clueless arrogance that is shocking from them. Have they been arrogant? Yes. But clueless? No.
But now Google is in direct conflict with everyone it wants to serve via search and advertising. Google is making itself the enemy.
Danny Sanchez quotes Eric Schmidt saying what Google has always said — and what I have repeated — when media companies fear it:
“It’s better to think of Google as a technology company. Google is run by three computer scientists, and Google is an innovator in technology in our space. We’re in the advertising business – 99% of our revenue is advertising-related. But that doesn’t make us a media company. We don’t do our own content. We get you to someone else’s content faster.
You might ask how this is different from Google providing platforms such as Blogger and Blogspot. I suspect that’s the way Google is thinking of it. But now Google is creating its own media brand.
Second, it is making a claim of authority. Says the official blog:
Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. . . .
Google is also confirming the most common complaint about the internet: that it’s filled with crap. By this act, Google is agreeing, for it says we need Google to come along and create find the people who can create uncrap. That is precisely a media argument: that openness does not produce quality or credibility.
Google: stop before it’s too late. Competing with those you serve — from a position of unbeatable advantage — isn’t just bad business. It’s evil.
: It’s not as if Google wasn’t warned. Here were Danny Sullivan and Duncan Riley fearing that Google had gone a step too far when word of Knol got out in December.
: Note: I accidentally posted this before I had finished it. Some may have gotten the incomplete version in RSS before I made some corrections. Sorry.
: MORE: Valleywag gasps at Marissa Mayer acknowledging that GoogleNews makes money for Google even though it doesn’t have ads. At Fortune’s Brainstorm conference, she said, according to Fortune:
The online giant figures that Google News funnels readers over to the main Google search engine, where they do searches that do produce ads. And that’s a nice business. Think of Google News as a $100 million search referral machine.
Valleywag clucks:
What neither Mayer nor Fortt explained: The real reason why Google doesn’t put ads on Google News. That’s because it fears lawsuits from the media organizations whose headlines and text it picks up and republishes. (It’s already lost a court case brought by a newspaper group in Belgium). By not running ads on Google News, Google lawyers could argue it’s not profiting from their work.Mayer just shot a $100 million hole in that argument. When she puts a number on how much money Google News makes for her employer, she gives newspapers’ lawyers a big, fat, juicy reason to demand a cut of the business. Sure, the newspapers already make money from the traffic Google sends their way — but do you think, given a $100 million prize, they won’t try to double-dip?
In the link economy, it becomes incumbent upon the receiver of a link to monetize it and newspapers do get a lot of links from Google.
Is Google psychoanalyzing me?
I just noticed that all the AdSense ads on the page with this post were for anger management.
Well, I didn’t think I sounded angry. How did Google conclude that I was? Is it targeting ads just to words or now to moods?
Next time I do go on a rant, I expect them to advertise massages, spas, merlots, and drugs.
A bunch of anti-Obama blogs were apparently shut down on Google’s Blogspot as suspected spam. They say that Obama fans reported them as spam to get rid of them. I have no idea what the truth is. The fear online has been that false information could be spread. It’s another fear that speech can be silenced.
(I suppose I should make clear that I don’t think any official Obama campaign effort is remotely behind this if it’s true. The point, instead, is that rogues can cause trouble. This would seem to be a variation on Swiftboating but rather than try to get a message out, the goal would be to bat an opposing message down.)
Wonderful story in today’s Times on using Google data to show what we’re really interested in: more orgies than apple pie. The peg is an obscenity trial in Florida in which the defense attorney demonstrates through Google Trends data that there are more searches for group sex than for recipes. And so, if you truly want to see the community standards that define obscenity we’ll know when we see it, then don’t listen to our preaching but to our searching.
Marketers have always known this. Back when I was at People, we’d test covers of Diane Sawyer in a suit vs. Brooke Shields in a bathing suit and in person, people would say they’d buy the former but on their own, in the newsstand, they, of course, bought the latter. Behavior trumps opinion.
And now we have so many more ways to know what the market is really doing, what the people are really thinking: Google, Flickr, Amazon…. That is the key value of the internet and companies on it: collected knowledge.
And so yesterday, as the nation mourned George Carlin, it’s a wonderful thing to look at the uses of his seven dirty words on Twitter and in blogs, our views of him saying them on YouTube, and — as I’m sure we’ll see in a few days — our searches on Google and purchases on Amazon. There, FCC, is the best evidence of our community standards. Actions speak more truthfully than words.
Google Trends new service that allows you to get audience stats through Google’s eyes for any site doesn’t work for … Google.com.
I upset a few — very few — people with my crack at the end of my NY Post op-ed suggesting that the government would be in better shape in the hands of Google than in those of the bureacrats and politicians who run it now.
Well, maybe it’s not so far-fetched.
When Eric Schmidt spoke to the Economic Club of Washington this week, he said:
It is possible to build a culture around innovation. It is possible to build a culture around leadership. And it is possible to build a culture around optimism. Google is an example, but by no means the only example, of a culture that can be built based on relatively scalable principles. We could run our country this way. We could run the world this way….So let’s be revolutionaries. Let’s take this opportunity, this huge change that is before us, with technlology, and let’s change businesses, communications and the way we interact, on some new principles that reflect the very best of America.
That’s an apt rallying cry for the Personal Democracy Forum in just over a week.
