The vast majority of employees at Google work on stuff unrelated to AdWords and AdSense, they work on technology, and get paid to do it and are not told to come up with new ideas for showing more ads. A tiny minority of people rake in money on ads, which frees up the vast majority of engineers to work on other stuff. AdWords and AdSense scale, they simply don't need an army of employees to maintain them, Google doesn't need 15,000 employees all working on ad serving.
Like the vast vast vast majority of all consumer facing internet businesses ever created since the dawn of the Web, Google was created to do something: Search, without any clear business plan about how to make money. Most Web businesses do not charge end user fees, they are founded to get users, and either make money from ads, or get acquired by those that do.
Facebook: Ads. Twitter: Ads. Yahoo: Ads. New York Times? Ads. You really think the journalists at the New York Times view themselves as working at an advertising company because that's the only way they can get paid? You think it's accurate to describe the New York Times as an Ad Agency?
Much rarer do we see people saying "Facebook is just an ad company" in forums, this charge is always lobbed at Google, which says to me that there's some intellectual dishonesty going on, people with an axe to grind.
Google spent nearly $7 billion on R&D in 2013. Most of this spending is targeted not at ads, but in trying to develop other lines of business with diversified revenue sources. Larry Page is not an idiot, he sees that relying on ads for 97% of your revenue is a risky proposition. It just turns out to be a hard problem to get people to pay for content now, even on mobile you can see prices being driven down to free + freemium. Unless Google wants to be an Enterprise company like Oracle (a market where people have a proven track record of throwing money at stuff), it's at the mercy of what people are willing to do, and as shown over and over again, people like get stuff for free if paid for by others (ads).
Even for HBO and some other channels, the majority of media people consume, even that on "for pay" cable TV is still funded by commercial ads. You take a TV show which has a $2 million per episode budget, and you need a atleast 2 million people per week to pay $1. Now, how likely is that when many shows can't even command an audience of 1 million free viewers.
> Like the vast vast vast majority of all consumer facing internet businesses ever created since the dawn of the Web, Google was created to do something: Search, without any clear business plan about how to make money.
Without AdWords, we'd probably have gone back to AltaVista.
> Most Web businesses do not charge end user fees, they are founded to get users, and either make money from ads, or get acquired by those that do.
This is where it's confusing. AdWords behaves like old-fashioned newspaper advertising: Google both control the inventory of spots to advertise and accept the adverts.
AdSense is different: Google doesn't not provide inventory, but they fill it. In that respect they are more like a central ad buying agency than a newspaper.
> which says to me that there's some intellectual dishonesty going on, people with an axe to grind.
Or it might be that I'm just pointing out that what Google spends its money on doesn't change what people actually pay Google for.
If you classify companies according to what they are paid to do, then Google is a company that gets paid to take and display advertising, just as Ford is a company that's paid to manufacture and distribute cars or WalMart is paid to source and distribute durable and perishable retail goods.
Journalists don't like to think about where the money is coming from. And in fairness to journalists, that's been the grand bargain for more than a century: pay my wages, don't meddle too much and I'll give you good copy to sell your papers.
Well now the grand bargain is: pay my wages, don't meddle too much and I'll produce services that support, directly or indirectly, AdSense and AdWords.
There is no shame in this. None of this detracts one iota from the journalists at a media firm or the engineers at Google. But TANSTAAFL.
> Google spent nearly $7 billion on R&D in 2013.
And most of the wages paid at newspapers are not paid to the advertising or classifieds staff. They make enough money per head to support a much larger staff of journalists, designers, subeditors, setters, printers etc etc etc.
> Larry Page is not an idiot, he sees that relying on ads for 97% of your revenue is a risky proposition.
I agree. But simply elbowing your way into a different business model is hard. Really, really hard. Ask Newscorp. Ask Microsoft.
The number of employees on each department, even if you knew it, is totally irrelevant.
NY Times is a newspaper and totally different from Google which has Adsense, Doubleclick and Adwords. Google essentially controls online advertising and 95+% of their revenue is from....ads! Now with Google going 100% pay-to-play on eCommerce and transactional keywords it's even more of an ad company (milking the search goodwill.) You can call them whatever you want of course
Wrong question! What % of the world's advertising does NYT control, online, offline or mobile? What advertising tools does NYT offer? What is the ratio of ads vs content on money topics on NYT?
Before, it was "all that matters is how you are paid", now it's "let's finely slice the details of this, so as to exonerate everyone else, but still try to make Google a whipping boy." The axe needs more grinding.
Before, it was "all that matters is how you are paid"
Said who? How about looking at what the company focuses on? Before seeing content on Google I see a billion million gazillion ads, often looking similar to organic results. A while back ads were on the page to pay the bills but now they are the main content, by design. Shopping also is 100% ads. So what company is Google again? Oh, yeah, trying to send the users to the best site asap. My @ss.
Hyperbole is unbecoming. Google's mission is to organize the world's information, to give you the best answer to questions, not to send you to "the best site". Sometimes the best answer is a site, sometimes it isn't. Very few users want a search engine that sends them to a linkfarm or another search engine, they want answers in the fewest number of steps. If I ask what the weather is, I want a temperature and immediate forecast, I don't want to have to click through to Weather.com and initiate another 2 dozen HTTP requests for extra resources to get the answer, especially for mobile. I'll click through to another site if I want an extended 5 or 10 day forecast, or I want something beyond factual data.
Since Knowledge Graph was introduced, there are now millions of queries that don't even show any ads at all. For example, I search for "Hawaii" on Google (just did it in an incognito window), and I get a Knowledge Graph card and zero ads. I do it on Bing and I get travel ads for Alaskaair.
Since Knowledge Graph was introduced, there are now millions of queries that don't even show any ads at all. For example, I search for "Hawaii" on Google (just did it in an incognito window), and I get a Knowledge Graph card and zero ads. I do it on Bing and I get travel ads for Alaskaair.
Your anecdotal evidence is worth nothing, we know the number of ad clicks because Google reports them each quarter. And they are rising by double digits quarter after quarter. So many more people are thinking that an ad is the best answer. Surprise, huh?
The number of ad clicks can indeed rise even as the number of ads shown declines due to better ad targeting. Your reasoning has been consistently flawed in most of the threads.
The number of ad clicks can indeed rise even as the number of ads shown declines due to better ad targeting.
So users are finding more and more of their answers in ads? Good thing Google controls both ads and 'content.' And anecdotally the number of ads has increased immensely on transactional keywords, especially after Page. Content is buried by them. http://www.zoekmachine-marketing-blog.com/wp-content/uploads...
Your reasoning has been consistently flawed in most of the threads.
whatever you say. By the way, if you work at Google you should state so, quite a few Googlers have that habit. I suspect you are, given the stock answer you gave for the "best answer." If you work for Google, I don't blame you, It's hard to defend the same practices you and your bosses railed against just 2-3 years ago.
Like the vast vast vast majority of all consumer facing internet businesses ever created since the dawn of the Web, Google was created to do something: Search, without any clear business plan about how to make money. Most Web businesses do not charge end user fees, they are founded to get users, and either make money from ads, or get acquired by those that do.
Facebook: Ads. Twitter: Ads. Yahoo: Ads. New York Times? Ads. You really think the journalists at the New York Times view themselves as working at an advertising company because that's the only way they can get paid? You think it's accurate to describe the New York Times as an Ad Agency?
Much rarer do we see people saying "Facebook is just an ad company" in forums, this charge is always lobbed at Google, which says to me that there's some intellectual dishonesty going on, people with an axe to grind.
Google spent nearly $7 billion on R&D in 2013. Most of this spending is targeted not at ads, but in trying to develop other lines of business with diversified revenue sources. Larry Page is not an idiot, he sees that relying on ads for 97% of your revenue is a risky proposition. It just turns out to be a hard problem to get people to pay for content now, even on mobile you can see prices being driven down to free + freemium. Unless Google wants to be an Enterprise company like Oracle (a market where people have a proven track record of throwing money at stuff), it's at the mercy of what people are willing to do, and as shown over and over again, people like get stuff for free if paid for by others (ads).
Even for HBO and some other channels, the majority of media people consume, even that on "for pay" cable TV is still funded by commercial ads. You take a TV show which has a $2 million per episode budget, and you need a atleast 2 million people per week to pay $1. Now, how likely is that when many shows can't even command an audience of 1 million free viewers.