Google Ad Revenue: What Happens When the One Trick Pony Gets Seedy Toe?
May 1, 2020
Seedy toe?
What’s that? If you live in Kentucky, home of the abandoned Derby you know. If not, your child’s pony is going to be in discomfort. And the costs? You don’t want to know what large animal vets in horse country charge, do you?
“CEO Sundar Pichai Spells Out Alphabet’s Positives, but COVID-19 Damage to Ad Revenues Is Only Going to Get Worse” presents a key point articulated by the chief Googler Sundar Pichai:
In March, we experienced a significant and sudden slowdown in ad revenues. The timing of the slowdown correlated to the locations and sectors impacted by the virus and related shutdown orders…Overall, recovery in ad spend will depend on a return to economic activity.
The article also quotes the Google chief financial officer as observing: The second quarter will be “a difficult one.” Google’s CFO did not elaborate on Google cost control measures. Yep, cost control. Important DarkCyber believes.
But back to seedy toe and a lame pony.
The bulk of Google revenues come from online advertising. Amazon is doing a good job of capturing product search and that means that Amazon product ad revenue is likely to track those clicks. That’s bad news for Google as the bad news from the virus disruption affects large swaths of the global economy. Facebook’s ad revenues may have taken a hit in the most recent quarter, but that outstanding, other-directed manager Mark Zuckerberg hungers for more ad revenue as well.
Google may be able to kick sand in the face of dead tree outfits, but the datasphere is a different sort of construct.
Limping ponies will not be invited to parade at birthday parties. Lame ponies can be expensive to make well again.
Here in Kentucky there are only so many places at the Old Friends Farm. Then what? A one way ticket to Fiji? Ponies are a treat of sorts in Oceania. Bula!
Google needs to avoid seedy toe. Amazon and Facebook are not ponies. These outfits are tigers with a hunger for easy prey; for example, a lame pony.
Stephen E Arnold, May 1, 2020
Google: Another Glitch Down Under
May 1, 2020
DarkCyber spotted this story from ABC.net.au: ‘Publisher’ Google Ordered to Pay $40k in Damages for Defaming Melbourne Lawyer after Court Ruling. Aside from the money, the key point in the write up is the word “publisher.” I wrote Google: The Digital Gutenberg in 2008. The book is now out of print because another wonky publisher nuked itself.
In that monograph, I pointed out that Google was indeed a publisher, a digital Gutenberg. Auto generated pages were content, results lists with YouTube recommendations were reports, and nifty boxes summarizing Machu Picchu were the equivalent of old school pasteboard baseball cards. (Just try and steal those in the 1950s, gentle reader.)
Few agreed with my conclusions in Google: The Digital Gutenberg. Now, 12 years later, it seems as if a Supreme Court of Victoria (Australia) has seen the light.
According to the article, the person who triumphed over Googzilla allegedly said:
“Her Honour has found that Google is a publisher of the defamatory imputations once Google receives notice of a defamatory publication online as a result of the use of its search engine.”
The key word: Publisher. If the other Five Eyes embrace this decision, DarkCyber what other interesting consequences might manifest themselves.
Stephen E Arnold, May 1, 2020
Google Play: And by Whose Rules?
May 1, 2020
Arstechnica published “Google Play Has Been Spreading Advanced Android Malware for Years.” The write up’s observation which caught DarkCyber’s attention was:
Attackers behind the campaign used several effective techniques to repeatedly bypass the vetting process Google uses in an attempt to keep malicious apps out of Play.
How long has the “inattention” allowed malware? Maybe just about around four years.
With Google doing backtracking on its stellar content verification processes, will the company be able to protect its users from malware?
DarkCyber’s view is that the task becomes more difficult each day. Google’s ability to control its costs is one message conveyed in its financial results. Content curation that delivers reliable results may require more resources than Google is able to provide.
The result?
What we have is what we get it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, May 1, 2020
Google Meet: A Zoom Challenger
April 29, 2020
DarkCyber thought that Google Hangouts was the Zoom challenger. Wrong again it seems.
Google Meet will be rolling out in the near future, possibly now. Google’s Zoom is a digital place to hangout. Errr, no. Google Meet is a place to meet. There’s a difference, probably best understood by someone who used one of Google’s numerous chat applications. Meet seems to be another Google “me too” play, but apparently it’s a mature, deep, and unique way to hangout, I mean, meet.
According to “Google Meet Premium Video Conferencing—Free for Everyone”:
Today [April 29, 2020] , we’re making Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. We’ve invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable video conferencing solution that’s trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world, and in recent months we’ve accelerated the release of top-requested features to make it even more helpful.
Okay, just get a Google account and anyone can use Google Meet. Will Google Meet be available in China? Russia? Errr. DarkCyber does not know.
Several points from the Google announcement:
- Meet was available to G Suite customers. I am a G Suite customer, and I did not know there was a Google Meet. Hangouts, yes. Meet, no.
- Meet will allow me to stream for up to “100,000 viewers within your domain.” What’s a domain? The write up does not say.
- The write up says, “Free G Suite Essentials for enterprise customers.” Will there be a for fee service offering more than essentials.
Like many Googley announcements, the sizzle is evident. But does the steak have Zoomy features like animated backgrounds, transcripts, and a reasonably coherent interface.
Will Google Meet face the same fate as Shoelace? What? Who? Exactly.
PS. The Meet anigif is retro, even MySpacey.
Stephen E Arnold, April 30, 2020
Google Cloud: A Fog Bank Persists
April 26, 2020
Protocol published “Google’s Thomas Kurian on COVID-19, Customers in Crisis and the Big Cloud Fight.”
Let’s look at one slice of this interview with Google’s stratocumulus of cloud computing. One interesting question and Thomas Kurian’s answer is:
Google has a reputation for closing down services that it believes aren’t being used in sufficient numbers. Among people I talk to, that sometimes raises a red flag when it comes to working with Google. As you work with these new customers who are in really, really severe difficulty right now, what kind of assurances are you giving them that, as they bet on these services from you, you’ll be there over the long haul?
Our cloud services are offered under a standard support agreement. For cloud services publicly, for example, all the GCP services are exactly the same as those from our competitors. So we give them assurances that we won’t deprecate a service without the proper notice period, and the notice periods are exactly the same as competitors.
DarkCyber noticed the word support in the write up five times in the 1900 word write up.
One wisp of condensed information wafted through the write up: “Google has struggled to win the trust of the enterprise buyer.” Why? Perhaps the list of discontinued services displayed on the Killed by Google Web site explains the challenge. With little or no warning, with little or no explanation, and with little or no interest in the users and “customers” relying on these services—more than 190 products and services have been disappeared. To make Google’s “strategy” more clear, Google Hangouts which was marked for death is now trying to be like Zoom.
The article is a showcase for Google to make clear that it really, really is committed to delivering commercial grade cloud services. Google was committed to Google Plus as well as the other 190 plus products and services dismissed with a Googley insouciance.
The write up is crafted to make clear that Google is an enterprise class service provider. The company made that pitch to the US Department of Defense, only to pull out of Project Maven because employees were not happy with the application of a Google technology to a US government need. And there are other examples of the words of the Google not matching the actions of the Google. One example: Search services for China. Yep, waffling.
What’s the challenge for the online advertising company? One clue is that according to the write up, Google’s cloud revenues for the fourth quarter of 2019-2020 was $2.9 billion. Compare that to Amazon AWS revenue of $9.9 billion. Google likes data. Well, that gap is a data point.
Is the Google Cloud going to approach the enterprise with the track record of Microsoft and its partners or the go-go roar of the Bezos bulldozer?
Google has the vocabulary for the task. The Googler uses two interesting words in his clarification of the Google approach. These words are re-pivot and re-platform. Those terms remind me that Google re-placed Diane Greene, the previous stratocumulus of cloud computing.
Did the interview convince DarkCyber that Google will stick with cloud computing? Sort of. You know like the fog comes in on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2020
Google and Its Cost Cutting: More Than Meets the Eye
April 24, 2020
DarkCyber is pleased that CNBC continues to write interesting news stories. In fact, this write up only mentions Covid twice, a new record for news associated with talking head video. “Google to Cut Marketing Budgets by As Much as Half, Directors Warned of Hiring Freezes” reports:
Google is slashing its marketing budgets by as much as half for the second half of the year, according to internal materials viewed by CNBC. One email about the cuts went out to marketing employees this week, noting the budget cuts and a new hiring freeze for full-time and contract employees.
The now standard unnamed sources and no picture of the “documents” the canny CNBC news sleuths were able to read.
Let’s assume that everything in the write is accurate. Let’s ask some questions which are not addressed in the scoop:
- What’s the connection between Google’s giving away free product listings in Google Shopping and this new austerity?
- What is the increase in data center and bandwidth in the last three years? Why has Google’s CFO been unable to trim or stabilize these costs?
- What will Google do to hold back or flatten the ad losses to Amazon and Facebook?
- What are the direct costs associated with Google’s new found sense of responsibility for problematic content in ads and in YouTube videos?
DarkCyber’s analyses suggest that Google is now suffering from more than two decades of mismanagement. My research team calls this style of running a company the high school science club management method of HSSCMM. The idea is that decisions made without context or sufficient wisdom have created a machine that devours available cash.
On the surface, Google is Googley. But beneath the surface are indications of stress. There are employee pushbacks. There is interesting management behavior in the legal department. There is a palpable sense of vulnerability to Amazon and Facebook.
Googzilla is starting to shiver because there are more innovative, aggressive predators sniffing around the happy campus in Mountain View.
The reaction? Innovation, happy employees, bug free services, relevant search results, easy to use products like Google Maps?
Nope.
Fire people in marketing. Once the lawyers were housed in trailers “off campus.” Now another non engineering group is sacrificed to feed the maw of tough to control technology costs. Sacrifice the marketers.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2020
Google Helps Make A Big Digital Library
April 24, 2020
As a technology company, Google claims that it operates for the betterment of humankind. Google’s main purpose is to make a buck, but when not chasing profit the search engine giant does do other things. Google operates on the edge of cutting technology, because the company is constantly investing and inventing new ideas. It also focuses on projects that preserve the past. In a manner similar to the Internet Archive and historical institutions, Google is working with the “City Of Antwerp And Google To Digitize 100,000 Books.”
While the blog post claims that book publishing is limited to the “dignified and highbrow” society, the true publishing industry has more in common with its sixteenth century predecessor:
“But it was a different story in the 16th century, about a hundred years after the invention of the printing press. Publishing was a high-risk, high-reward proposition: With the right backing and enough capital investment, an entrepreneur could become wildly successful. But publishing the wrong thing in the wrong place could be disastrous—even fatal, with governments and religious authorities taking a very severe view of what content was fit to print.”
During the sixteenth century, Christophe Plantin established his own publishing house in Antwerp, Belgium. He dealt wit religious persecution, but that did not prevent him from becoming a printing powerhouse that continued for generations. Plantin’s house is now an UNESCO World Heritage Site, a museum, and houses 25,000 early printed books. Google and Antwerp have teamed up to digitize over 32,000 books from the museum and 60,000 more from the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library.
The partnership will result in more than 100,000 books from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries being digitized and accessed freely through Google Books and the libraries’ catalogues. The books are in the public domain and will contain full text search. The digitization project starts in 2021. Before that Antwerp and Google are sorting out the logistics.
Whitney Grace, April 24, 2020
Google: The Laser That Threatened James Bond Creeps Closer to the Private Parts of the GOOG
April 23, 2020
Update: I omitted the link to the actual Googler blog post. Too excited thinking about “integrity.” My bad.
Goldfinger was an interesting film. In 1965, lasers were advanced. Some thought they were death rays. The Hollywood people, sunning around the pool with Technicolor drinks, thought the laser was the ideal way to burn James Bond’s private parts. Goldfinger was the bad actor. Now Google’s integrity weapon may be threatening Alphabet’s private parts. Odd job indeed.
The laser posed a risk to the fictional James Bond’s private parts. The Google integrity verification is a similar risk with one difference: Googlers are steering the destructive beam of actual data toward Alphabet’s secret places.
Flash forward to 2020, “Google to Require All Advertisers to Pass Identity Verification Process.” The word “all” is probably not warranted, but it sounds good. Talking heads enjoy glittering generalities and categorical affirmatives.
Nevertheless, the news story, if accurate, reveals some interesting quasi-factoids. Here’s one example:
Google began requiring political advertisers wanting to run election ads on its platform to verify their identity back in 2018. Now, that program is being extended to all advertisers, the company wrote in a blog post this morning from John Canfield, its director of product management for ads integrity. The change will allow consumers to see who’s running an ad and which country they’re located in when they click “Why this ad?” on a placement.
Advertisers have to “prove” something other than having a mechanism to put funds into a Google advertising account. Second, Google has a job description which includes these words: “Management” and “integrity.” Plus, the information will not help Google. Nope, the winners in knowing who allegedly buys ads is “consumers.”
Google’s integrity person allegedly said:
“This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see from Google and help them make more informed decisions when using our advertising Controls,” John Canfield, Google’s director of product management for ads integrity, said in the post. “It will also help support the health of the digital advertising ecosystem by detecting bad actors and limiting their attempts to misrepresent themselves.”
How does one become verified by Google’s integrity people?
Organizations are required to submit personal legal information (like a W9 or IRS document showing the organization’s name, address and employer identification number). An individual from the organization also needs to provide legal identification on the organization’s behalf. Individuals have to show government-issued photo ID like a passport or ID card. Google said it previously had collected basic information about the advertiser but didn’t require documentation to verify.
How effective are Google’s efforts to filter, screen, and verify? We know that human traffickers and others in this line of business have infiltrated videos on YouTube. We know that one can run a query for “Photoshop crakz”:
Apparently Google’s system cannot block listings for stolen commercial software. In fact, the listing for this illegal offering was updated three days ago. DarkCyber knows that some legitimate sites’ content has not been updated for longer periods of time. Notice how Google’s smart autocorrect changed “crakz” into “cracked.” Helpful smart software. Why does Google display the result? Why doesn’t Adobe email Google’s search wizards to have these links with illegal intent filtered? One reason may be that Adobe has emailed Google customer support and is, like many others with questions for the Google, waiting for a response from an informed Googler?
Amazon: Big Game Hunting with the Bezos Bulldozer
April 23, 2020
Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft rule the gaming industry. Because there is lots of money to be made from games, Google and Amazon want those dollars. Alphabet Inc. launched Google Stadia to mixed reviews, but Tom’s Guide states that, “Amazon’s Project Tempo Could Crush Google Stadia-Here’s Why.”
Google Stadia is a cloud gaming platform and Amazon seeks to rival it with its own called Project Tempo set to arrive in 2021. It was originally going to release in 2020, but COVID-19 delayed it. Not much is known about Project Tempo, except Amazon has the cloud infrastructure and streaming capabilities to outdo Google.
Amazon already has a gaming platform:
“With Project Tempo, Amazon has a chance to succeed where Google has yet to. The company already offers a monthly gaming subscription called Twitch Prime, which comes as part of your Amazon Prime account for $119 per year or $12.99 per month. Twitch Prime provides access to free games, complementary in-game content and free monthly channel subscriptions you can use to support your favorite streamers.
If Amazon were to fold Project Tempo into this service and give Twitch Prime members an instant collection of high-quality games to stream from the cloud, it could offer one heck of a value — and drive even more Amazon Prime subscriptions.”
Google Stadia requires $129 Premium Edition kit and a $10 mostly subscription fee. If Amazon offers better game acmes through their Amazon Prime subscription service, then its would be one heck of a deal for gamers. Gamers want quality over quantity as well as the best and newest technology. Gamers, however, are quick to dismiss rip-offs and if Google Stadia continues in the same vein they will not stand a chance against Project Tempo.
Whitney Grace, April 23, 2020
Google Free Product Listings: A Free-for-All
April 22, 2020
The battle royale is one of the keys to Fortnite’s success. There will be one winner. Google, if the information in the article “In Major Shift, Google Shopping Opens Up to Free Product Listings” is accurate, has declared war on Amazon’s digital catalog of products. The Google-Amazon dust up will be interesting to watch. Amazon plugs along. That’s why I call the company’s tactical approach the Bezos bulldozer. Bulldozers may not be speedy, but the beasties can grind along.
The write up states:
The Google Shopping tab results “will consist primarily of free product listings…”
I noted this comment about the method:
…The free listings will be powered by product data feeds uploaded to Google Merchant Center. Google opened up Merchant Center to all retailers a little over a year ago to start enabling organic product visibility in areas of the search results, including Image search.
More information will become available.
Will Dark Web merchants list their products on Google? Will Google have the acumen to screen product listings? Will banned products find their way on to the service?
These questions will be answered in the near future.
And the bulldozer? I think it will stay the course.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2020
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