Google blames social media
Plenty of excellent analysis across the web to Google's "disappointing" financial results.
Dan Farber and Larry Dignan on ZDNet.
Greg Sterling on SearchEngineLand.
Both go into a lot of detail about comments from chief financial officer George Reyes about the impact (or not) of social networks advertising to the bottom line.
In not so many words, the clicks on Google Adsense from the likes of MySpace are not meeting expectations.
An apparent problem with social networks, as someone put it to us a few days ago, is that users are not in "transaction mode" when they are visiting a social network - they are in "chat mode".
Kevin May, editor, Travolution
Technorati tags: google social network
4 comments:
As a regular visitor of social networks and the web in general I tend to be blind to Google ads.
A lot of sites have tried various "tricks" to get users to click ads but alot of users of the likes of MySpace are web savvy.
seen this?
Microsoft said on Friday it had offered to buy search engine group Yahoo for $44.6bn as the software giant seeks to catch up with arch-rival Google.
The unsolicited cash proposal, with a cash and shares alternative, is pitched at $31 a share, a 62 per cent premium to Yahoo’s closing share price of $19.18 on Thursday. Shares in Yahoo jumped 53 per cent to $29.13 in pre-market trading.
Microsoft signalled that a combination of the two companies would provide stronger competition for Google, the leading internet search engine. It said the proposed combination could generate synergies of $1bn, and provide significant economies of scale....
http://tinyurl.com/2fugvd
As usual, it's about relevancy and also place. When I'm in buying mode and search is when Google ads are useful. When I'm on Facebook or other social network sites they're much less so. As Darren, I tend to ignore them like I ignore most banner ads.
When I look at them in GMail, it's usually to glean some information from them but again, rarely click.
In the social network context, it's still interruption marketing and that, as we know by know, doesn't work too well.
Just another thought; I’ve been trialling Adsense on my blog, just banners, in specific pages, and I have been disappointed by the relevancy of the ads. Page with travel related content generated an ad for Tesco online shopping.
People aren’t going to click = less revenue for Google.
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