
Google Stops Print Ads Program - pclark
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-01-21-n23.html
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AndrewWarner
Could anyone here explain how this fit in with Google's mission?

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enomar
While their state mission might be "Organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible", I'm pretty sure public companies are obligated to
do what's best for their shareholders. In this case, I think they were trying
to make money ;)

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tome
> public companies are obligated to do what's best for their shareholders

I hear this a lot. Do you have a reference for that, particularly one which
explains which definition of "best" is used?

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fallentimes
Especially since what's "best" in the short term is different than what's
"best" in the long term.

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tome
Quite, and my main problem with it is that although "best" may be well
defined, the path to "best" may be very uncertain.

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keltecp11
Was this due to the recession or was this due to Google not conducting the
right research?

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mdasen
Probably a combination of things.

1\. The newspaper industry is just doing really poorly which means there is
little money to be had there. So, this program, not greatly connected to
Google's main business, also probably wouldn't make a lot of money.

2\. Traditional ads (TV/newspaper) differ from web ads. With the web, you're
trying to automatically place ads for an infinite variety of content and
users. With traditional ads, you're placing one ad for every user and there's
a finite amount of content. So, all of Google's techniques for web advertising
have little to do with traditional ads.

3\. What kind of research can you do? Like, with web ads, people can look at
impression to click ratio of the ad placed next to many different content;
impression to click of 100 variations of the ad; click to sale based on all
those conditions. Traditional ads you really only get circumstantial evidence
(ie. we ran 100 ads this week and sales went up 5%, therefore 100 ads raises
sales 5% - which, clearly isn't good evidence since that change could have
been caused by any number of things). Sure, sometimes they say, go to
dell.com/tv-offer-8, but how many people do that rather than going to
dell.com?

Google's success is having computers do the work for them. They measure things
analytically and mine data. Unfortunately, the traditional market isn't based
on data. Rather, it's based on intuition - this ad makes our product look
cool. Sometimes they back the intuition with quasi-data like focus groups, but
that's not a Google thing. Google mines hard quantitative data, they don't
intuit, they don't do qualitative data. I'm not saying that the others are
worse, just that it isn't Google's realm and therefore it just doesn't fit
Google in the way that web ads do.

Google is great at a few very important things. They don't have great ideas on
how to revolutionize everything. If there isn't a lot of data to analyze or
something that needs a ton of computing power, Google's unlikely to have a
great solution to your problem.

