Here’s a tough search problem (using Google at any rate): I’d like to find a good sample presentation in PPT (not a PDF) that was created by or for an advertising agency to showcase their wares… something that looks good, is in the PPT format. I’ve tried lots of different search combinations with positive and negative keywords in Google, but still haven’t come up with very much compelling. This shouldn’t be that difficult.

One thing like this I’ve done in the past is ask my network on LinkedIn, there are usually a couple of good examples to be had from this type of exercise, but ultimately it takes more time and you don’t get the kind of variety and volume you’d expect from a web-wide search. It’s a bit hit and miss. Why isn’t there a better social search capability for this type of stuff yet?

Great rant on Google from HipMojo, well worth a read.

And I enjoyed this post. I generally agree with Jerry on this stuff, so there you have it. I guess I’m a me-too contrarian then…

As I’ve mentioned before (somewhere), Google has historically held itself back from using cookies too aggressively to tie search behavior to user IDs that could allow for next-generation behavioral targeting… as echoed in this Reuters story about them.

Color me a little skeptical on this fact, though — I think that Google’s valuation can’t be justified unless the market believes that it will be able to leverage this data to better target and optimize online advertising, that it’s economics of “data scale” won’t allow it to remove some of the current advertising market inefficiencies.

I’ve heard unsubstantiated claims about Google using data gathered from the Google Desktop search product to produce all kinds of interesting addressable market data on users - so who knows what else will happen. Google has certainly held back on some of the more advanced cookie-based features when it comes to their Adsense “adserving”, but as they have built, will integrate (or get rid of) the Doubleclick serving platforms, and build an exchange (or really, another larger ad network depending on what you believe re: the Doubleclick ad exchange) I think it becomes impossible to avoid getting deeper into the cookie and data exchange business.

It’s a lot easier to shift the lines of “what is evil” when everyone else is doing it… and everyone else is/will be doing it.

Microsoft snapped up ADECN for an undisclosed amount. I actually missed the news and found out when I got a call from the company’s COO, Jeff Green. We’ve done some testing with ADECN, and I’ve found their UI to be quite good - I can’t really comment on the quality of traffic opportunities just yet as they still seem to be fairly small from most of the stuff I hear out there, but it’s a decent technology base with some customers. The acquisition would obviously not be anywhere near aQuantive or RightMedia valuation-wise…

It sounds like the Doubleclick offering will end up being more of a branded ad network than a true exchange - which leaves me thinking that there really is still room in this market for someone to build something big, the real question is getting traction. For now though, the GOOG-MSFT-YHOO lines seem drawn up, with MSFT lagging a bit. I still think right now Google is best positioned and would be in a much better position were they more focused on the display ad play .. but undoubtedly they’re there within 6 months.

When Google pays more than 3x what Doubleclick was bought for not too long ago, and you hear stories like “keeping Doubleclick away from Microsoft is worth billions to Google”, you have got to think things are pretty frothy out there. This is a big deal in more ways than one, and we can now see Google is willing to overpay for more than just YouTube.

Vinny has a great post about the potential impact on Google of the AOL marketplace deal. Less cross subsidization could be great for marketers (well, it means more work but it could mean much better matching of costs and revenue potentially!) and not as great for Google. Check it out.

A rumor exists that Google has a free advertising banner server that they have built/are continuing to build in house that will be offered for free. Obviously, Adsense is a kind of big, free adserver that is restricted quite a bit but my understanding here is that it could be used by sites to manage third-party serving as well as Adsense advertising quite easily. This is a very natural progression and doesn’t surprise me very much, and rumors have been around for over a year that Google was looking at adserver companies to buy. The point made at the time is why wouldn’t they just build their own, and I bet they have been doing precisely that. I know through hard experience its often easier to build your own adserver than integrate with someone else’s - and that’s probably the point for Google.

If Google’s YouTube is giving bandwidth away for free, then certainly adserving with its bandwidth and transactional constraints is a lesser task in terms of resources, and potentially more lucrative for Google since it is very closely related to some very big cash cows for them. Some of the issues that may come up relate to cookies and Googles ability and desire to manage cookies needed for adserving frequency tracking and other targeting. So I’m then assuming if they offer this service it will be either a hosted version that doesn’t offer these types of features (which would then squarely confine them to a low-end niche — even free open source adservers offer this - but the cookie domain issues are obviously quite significant for Google hosting these things even if it is not on their chief domain) or if they actually give a package that can be installed on your own server. The latter again is something you can fairly easily do with one of the open source packages, but it does require some installation etc. and that would reduce some of the value to Google.

I’m very interested to learn more about Google’s plans here…

Click to expand the picture

Doing a Google search typing in the company’s “GOOG” stock ticker as a search phrase helpfully displays the company’s stock price. And as (has and does) happens at many public companies with high-flying stock prices, I’m sure many current employees are checking the price and valuing their current holdings and paper worth. Some enterprising advertisers have cottoned onto this fact, notably a real estate agent looking to sell an $11 million home in the Bay Area to someone with newfound wealth. It seems like a move that might attract some of their employees to her as an agent, no doubt - so I think that it may actually pay off for her. Though Woot - now that’s one I think has far less chance of making any kind of ROI on this advertising tactic.

Exploits, patches, competing with everyone, hiring tonnes of great talent - a soaring stock price and market cap, it seems like Google is more and more like the Microsoft of old…

Congratulations to the YouTube guys on the sale to Google for $1.65 billion. It is almost inconceivable to me that this has happened given all the potential liability issues out there (especially now that there are real deep pockets), but on the other side of that it looks like the market really likes the deal pushing Google’s stock price upward today. Part of that obviously that Google is an 800lb Gorilla with whom copyright owners can negotiate some really significant concessions (read: revenue share relationships). I’ve been eagerly following Mark Cuban’s take on all the speculation, and in a great piece he still thinks Google is crazy. We will see… many thought MySpace cost a lot when it was sold and it turned out to be really cheap.

I’m not sure if it actually did start in Chad’s garage - but I do know that YouTube shared office space with us at LinkedIn at 1840 Embarcadero Rd in Palo Alto for some time before they got space of their own (Renkoo was another cool company there that now has its own spot). These are the old Paypal offices (where Chad Hurley was one of the first 20 employees) and LinkedIn only took up about half of the square footage, leaving space for a couple of small companies to take up some cube space and develop their stuff. Congrats to Roelof Botha, Reid Hoffman and all the investors, some mentioned in the FT story that also reminds us of the stunning fact that YouTube is selling for more than the $1.4 billion PayPal got from Ebay. Wow.

This is actually a pretty good idea though somewhat strange at first glance. Makes sense tho: It’s cheaper and less intrusive than a phone-call, but sending an SMS to “normalize” identity for creating new Gmail accounts as opposed to just letting anyone willy-nilly sign up for an email account, many of which end up being used for spamming (hotmail, yahoo etc.). Oh, I’m talking about you needing a mobile phone to sign up for Google’s Gmail email accounts now (previously you needed invitation).

A slick use of Ajax to let you create a simple static web page, but serves its purpose well enough: Google Pages (beta). Need to sign in using your gmail userID.

Google is pushing itself as a one-stop advertising solution for small publishers with the “sign up to advertise on this site” links, as discussed here on Internet Stock Blog. However, Google has not quite figured out how to properly optimize CPC ads and CPM ads together. This is something I’ve observed in working with Google AdSense, where CPC ads and site-targeted CPM ads are running at the same time — what sometimes seems to happen is a kind of “death spiral” effect.

After some initial testing period, the CPM level at which the site targeted ad is set seems to cap out the pricing for the CPC ads on the site — it’s less targeted and fewer and fewer people click on it and performance degrades. As performance of CPC ads degrades, the CPM ad looks more attractive to the algorithm and it then gets a bigger share etc.

And of course there is the usual opacity where you don’t have insight into specific metrics to be able to hunt down and resolve this issue, and tech support responses are (as is their wont) pretty unproductive.

Google is (of course) in a great position to make it work, but they will have to really spend time improving their algorithms if they want to be a viable total ad solution for sites with any amount of real traffic.

After Josh Stylman’s (of Reprise Media) quote in the NY Times on Monday where he said (quite correctly) that “Google is very opaque and bizarre to deal with” he posted a great follow-up post on the SearchViews blog here. I agree with him on the lack of transparency w.r.t. Google, by the way, from some current experiences also.

Google has quickly become the company that people in the Valley seem to love to hate as per this NYTimes article. Quote from Max Levchin (cofounder of PayPal):

Mr. Levchin, who last year founded a multimedia company in San Francisco called Slide, said Google “still has a long wick of good will to burn off,” but he added, “I’m surprised at how fast the company’s reputation is changing.”

The article says that Google is raising prices for technical talent in the area, and this is certainly validated according to some of the things I have heard (though they only really care about engineers and product managers, not business folk). Recent case in point (this is second hand): A product manager with just 3 years of experience received an offer of $125k base, with a $50k signing bonus, something like $200k in restricted stock (over 4 years) AND a guaranteed cash bonus amounting to at least $30-$40k per year. Now THAT is something I’ve never heard of.

Were I a Google investor (I am not, nor do I have a short position in the stock), looking not only at the dilution coming from their secondary offering but also thinking about what the ‘use of proceeds’ is likely to be, and I see things like the above I have to more seriously question the value of that investment…

Is Google seriously not going to talk to CNET for 1 year because they wrote a story that printed private information that was publicly accessible via Google? You’ve got to be kidding me!

Information coming out over the last few days about Google’s proposed payment system and how it might enable classifieds-style listings. Sounds like it would be somewhere between a PayPal and an Amazon Payments. Is eBay worried about this? You bet - though depending on how flexible of a system they want to create, they will have to do a lot of work to keep fraud concerns at bay. Many PayPal pretenders (and Citibank as well) got out of the personal payments business due to the difficulty of dealing with the fraud problem (and PayPal’s network-effects ascendancy). Avivah Litan provides the understatement of the day from the AP article:

While dueling with PayPal, Google probably would have to spend heavily to combat fraud - a chronic problem for payment processing systems. “If they don’t do a good job fighting fraud, Google will lose money on this,” Gartner’s Litan said.

Like so many things Google, there is currently too much hype and uncertainty for me to get into any detailed discussions on this forum just yet, but I’ll be sure to let you know when I’ve got more concrete information/thoughts.

UPDATE: Google says “We do not intend to offer a person-to-person, stored-value payments system” according to the newer Associated Press article. Yes, they won’t let you have an account that accumlates interest, nor will it be focused on “person to person” - which just means that it will be focused on businesses which is most of what PayPal’s business is, anyway.

I attended the TiECon 2005 conference here in Santa Clara this morning and saw Tom Friedman (The World is Flat) and Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google speak. Friedman is a topic for a later blog entry all in itself, but I did want to share some of Schmidt’s comments here. Google is definitely going to go further down the road of combining behavioral and contextual targeting. Quote as closely as I can from my notes:

“Right now we don’t know much about you. As we learn more about a person, we will be able to a better job of disambiguating their queries. For this we will look at various technologies, things that can learn while you use it (for example, your search history) and cannot be readily manipulated (because of our scale, using clicks to gauge whether something is of interest is subject to manipulation).”

I found it really interesting also that he called out measuring things based on clicks as subject to manipulation! Clearly it is, but of course if it is subject to manipulation to help a single person get more relevant search queries, doesn’t that stand to reason it is even more manipulable by someone or a group of someones seeking to profit from click fraud? Interesting…

Wow, this is cool: checking out TouchGraph’s GoogleBrowser. It creates visual representations of relationships between sites, based off of Google APIs. I love the way it animates when you bring up a new link, start exploring a different area.