Is it me or is everyone else stupid?

Google stock goes down the proverbial drain. A high of $750 in October down to below $448 on Tuesday. Who’d have thought it? And all this, just as i read from Sahar (although i cant find the article to trackback to,  due to all this bido malarkey) that Yahoo have seemingly pulled the rabbit from the hat with their new search API for webmasters that provides additional content in branded search results. Now there’s a thing. Im mailing our head technician as i speak [forward-slash] type.

Ok, backstep a little. Google stock is plummeting, why?  Well, on face value, its because they are plagued with click fraud. Yawn! So it’s the same old, same old message from Google, a “not our fault” policy where were “doing everything we can to alleviate it”.. Perhaps city investors have come to realize that there’s no-one left in domaining or publishing who still has an active relationship with Google and where their traffic is nothing but Über clean. Growth! Don’t make me laugh. There’s no-one left to gain growth from. Aside from the thousands of decent ex-adsense publishers who are now banned because of some mysterious reasoning by Google, the market is now mature, saturated even. Google have had everyone, banned many, kept a few and treated the rest like beggars where the balance of power lies deep behind their cocky self belief that they own the internet.. And will do forever.. Well, guess what….

So, aside from blaming the usual suspects [read domainers and small publishers here], whats the real reason for the stock demolition? Here we go. Seems the number of click ads in January was essentially the same as it was in the same month a year earlier, and dipped seven percent from December, a month known for major holiday shopping, according to industry-tracker comscore. You don’t say. Shame.
Numbers don’t lie. And what a dilemma for the great G. On the one hand they point the finger of fraud at parked pages and iffy webmasters and on the other hand their stock is suffering because growth has stagnated. Google themselves say that “it is taking steps to reduce click fraud, and to improve relevance and reduce numbers of ads displayed on search pages.” Big deal, i hear you say.

So what’s to do next? Do you eat a fairly chunky slice of humble pie and re-embrace those markets they previously thought beneath them [read domainers and webmasters again], perhaps being contactable and personable [sorry, what am i thinking], which would probably reignite their growth? Or do they take a stand and say “hey, we are now clean and, although we are not expected to grow anymore, at least your ad dollars will be well spent”? My guess is they opt for the latter. Oh, I do hope so.

So what about the forgotten forerunner, Yahoo? In the very least the Microhoo takeover has brought them back into the public gaze. More importantly, the advertiser gaze. And i wouldnt in the very least be surprised if they announce an increase in ad revenue over the past month or so. They are the biggest screw up in the history of the internet, but who’s to say this hasn’t changed, despite the unexpected boost Microsoft has handed them? A opportunity has seemingly presented itself to Yahoo to raise their profile and maybe do a u-turn on their decision to not fight Google in generic search marketing. But who’s to say they will take it, their track record in making obvious decisions is flaky at best? So, Yahoo, a valid contender for the belt or a perpetual has been?

In this humble bloggers opinion, I believe its neither. The future is going to be more fragmented. Perhaps not just the big two anymore. Perhaps theres to be many many ad networks with their own publishers and advertisers. Perhaps there will be more ad networks focusing on niche markets, vying for the decent traffic and paying the market rate, without any smartpricing’esque bullshit. And the angle. Well, the only angle anyone has is in owning the traffic. If you have a captive audience, you have the power. Not Google, for despite them dismissing arbitrage, they are the king of the arbitragers and they own nothing. They are simply a search engine. And do search engines really exist anymore? Honestly, do any of you folk who read my [somewhat currently intoxicated] musings use search for anything but research nowadays? When was the last time you searched for a product or a service and where you didnt know already which site held the answers? I don’t do search, thats for sure. I read a little while back about apathy on the internet. What this article said [and im ashamed i cant find it right now]  was that experienced web users with more than 10yrs regular use don’t use the internet for search anymore. What their research told them was that people who were mature users and who had already comprehensively sought things in the past like gambling, travel, banking, finance, [insert category here]  knew already where to go next time. Exactly, we all do. So why do we need Google? Thats really what the future holds folks.

I believe the next 18months will possibly see a breakdown in the status quo and more and more entrepreneurs and fledgling ad networks coming to the fore. And i say, good on ya. Google will need us more than we need them. Go buy your strong, generic, traffic domains right now. And if you have them, good on ya also, hold them, cherish them and don’t go cashing them in any day soon.

Shit, I’ve just had an out-of-body experience, maybe Rick Schwartz was right all along.  J