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Do you want Google’s new branding on your site?

May 7, 2007

By: William Charlwood

What do you think of the new-style AdSense ads where the Google logo is more prominent?

Personally I don’t like them.

I don’t care if they are apparently good for click through rates (I need more evidence).

What I do care about is that they show Google stamping their brand more and more heavily across the internet, which is what you’d expect from a monopoly player in the market.

It’s come at a bad time.

A year or two back, Google could do little wrong and it was a positive thing to appear to have any association with them.

Now though, things have changed.

Google is dominant and is behaving like a corporate monster.

Google is also beginning to irritate a large number of internet users who are just the sort of people who visit your site.

Take the YouTube acquisition. Google now offers for free, intellectual property in the form of TV shows, movies, training courses etc. that other companies spent billions of dollars developing. And now that advertising has appeared on YouTube, Google is making money off someone else’s investment.

Knowingly and with planned intention.

Suppose you’d invested a lot of money creating and selling movies and then one day, Google sets up a shop next door to you and gives copies of your movies away free – without paying you any licence fees.

You couldn’t compete but you would be entirely reasonable to complain.

“Oh don’t worry” says Google. “We have a mission to organize the world’s information and, besides, our corporate motto is ‘Don’t be evil’ so we’re obviously not being evil.”

Having spoken recently to a lot of AdWords advertisers and AdSense publishers I detect a growing unease about Google. They’ve upset a lot of people with the Google slap. They talk about how you need to increase the quality of your website to avoid it.

That sounds ok, even positive.

But who decides what is good?

Google does. Google is now judging your website and, what’s more, they won’t come clean and tell you what a “good” website is except in very vague terms (the Google Uncertainty Principle again).

And they get it wrong.

But if they don’t like you or your website, you are effectively out of business.

That is Google power and it is in the hands of people who aren’t behaving like innocent good guys any more even if they think they are.

Seriously, is that how you want the web to develop?

The solution, of course, is for either Yahoo or MSN (preferably both and others) to get their act together and become a competitive force. But they are far behind Google. It seems obvious to me that the CEO of Yahoo ought to be sacked immediately and replaced with someone who has the drive and capability to take on Google before this kind of dominance becomes truly detrimental to the internet. Yahoo has turned into a slow moving corporation with all the agility of a dizzy hippopotamus on an ice rink.

It is not a good online survival tactic.

Let’s look at their Search Marketing System that competes, badly, with Google’s: much less traffic and an atrocious control panel. But apart from being stupidly designed (just log on to a Google AdWords account to see how to do things properly boys) I think it has an architectural problem that is holding up the roll out of YPN (the Yahoo AdSense competitor). If you advertise on Yahoo in several different countries, you have several different Yahoo accounts. This discourages international advertising but it also makes it harder for Yahoo to integrate Search Marketing with YPN.

I’ve also read in many places that people who have been allowed to beta test YPN have been banned if they get too much non-US traffic.

Well Duh!

And Duh again!

Since when has the internet been a US-only thing? Wake up Yahoo.

I think you’ll find that the majority of the world does not live in the US as a matter of fact.

Yahoo does get right a few things though. You can talk to them on the ‘phone! That is a good and rare thing these days. Long may it last.

Rant over?

Not quite. Google bought DoubleClick a few weeks back. It owns Blogger. It is taking over the Yellow Pages market. More market dominance. Less choice for advertisers. More monopolistic behaviour.

I won’t get into any details about the way they are scanning books without publishers’ consents and making them available online and I’ll only mention in passing that they know a lot, lot more about you than you might think or want.

So back to my original question.

Don’t get me wrong. AdSense is a great tool for website owners but from time to time you need to review whether you want to be blatantly associated with Google. You probably do right now for the money alone.

But you should at least think it over from time to time and there really ought, by now, to be a decent competitor.

With best wishes

P/S — If you advertize on Google yourself, you might be interested in an article I published recently about the hidden value in your AdWords account. You can read it here: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=462054

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