June 14, 2007 by Vinny Lingham
Michael Arrington sums it up quite nicely, so here is the short version:
Not much commentary is needed on this one. Here’s what happened:
1. eBay doesn’t allow merchants to use Google Checkout to settle eBay transactions. Google invited eBay online sellers attending eBay Live! in Boston this week to a party that they called the Google Checkout Freedom Party.
2. eBay decides to pull all U.S. advertising on Google.
3. Google backs down, cancels the party.
4. Google looks like a complete wimp; eBay looks like a bully.
The party appeared to be nothing more than Google poking a little fun at eBay’s restrictive policies. eBay hit back with the biggest weapon they had, suggesting that tension between the companies goes very deep.
That was a seriously good laugh this morning!
So the big question… who’s “Click” is bigger? Adam Viener does a quick roundup on Revenews as well.
Bottom line, is that Google & eBay are becoming more competitive with each other every day and such a conflict was inevitable, to answer my question though, I would argue that Google has a much bigger “Click” and if they REALLY had to pull out all the stops, they could easily “improve” their algorithms to factor in a lot of the “Search Engine Optimization” work that eBay have done across their companies - and users would find that eBay would appear a lot lower in the natural results.
But then let’s remember that Google’s motto is “Do No (Relative) Evil”!
May 28, 2007 by Vinny Lingham
I just found that GMail is finally going to allow us to use pre-defined operators in order to search for stuff like, Unread Mail, etc. I’ve been asking for this type of functionality for a long time - glad it’s being released. Check out the JPG screenshot of the new Gmail Searches.
Update: Ok - now I feel like a real “Dwakhead”! I installed a plugin for FireFox earlier, from LifeHacker, which gave me this cool feature, and I didn’t realise it!
April 14, 2007 by Vinny Lingham
Google has just announced that they will acquire Doubleclick for $3.1bn. More coverage here:
TechCrunch
ReadWriteWeb
Screenwerk
SearchEngineLand
April 1, 2007 by Vinny Lingham
Oh this is so funny!!! Google tried to release an April Fool’s joke today about Google Paper
- the ability to have your emails printed and sent via snail mail!
The problem they didn’t realise is that in the latest issue of Fast Company, this ACTUALLY HAPPENS in India!!!
It’s called the ePost service from the Indian post office. Now you have a Billion Indians who are thinking that this is a legitimate alternative to their ePost service - nice try Google, but next time, make sure your PR people read Fast Company!!
March 21, 2007 by Vinny Lingham
I’m not going to rehash my previous post on this topic (still highly applicable - I highly recommend reading it before continuing with this post), but Google has finally launched Pay Per Action across their Adwords Network for US advertisers onto Adsense (not Search Network yet). I still believe that there are severe problems with the model, and Google will discover that it is not sustainable.
Search Engine Watch believes that Commission Junction’s days are numbered - I don’t think so! Andy Beal also has a similar view. We’ve been running CPA campaigns through Google for nearly 4 years now, and I think Google vastly under-estimates the risks and relationships at play with CPA marketing. The biggest concern though, is that Google’s internal arbitrage of CPC to CPA (which is what they’re doing, effectively), pushes prices CPC prices up in the short term, while they make mistakes that we’ve forgotten how to make, in our Clicks2Customers business.
Also, from the Inside Adwords blog, it’s not clear how they will deal with chargebacks - I’m guessing that the merchants have to factor this in? Can you imagine what’s next? Click-Order-Return (COR) fraud (i.e. Website owner clicks a merchant, places an order - merchant pays Google, Website owner returns goods - Google doesn’t refund merchant and Google pays Adsense site share of CPA). What if I’m a Google stockholder and I make a $1m purchase in order to boost the earnings, and then return or cancel the order - in theory, Google still gets paid and their stock goes up, but the merchant is out of business - just summising here, but I still don’t think CPA is viable for Google.
As I said in my previous post on this topic - Google has a smart bunch of guys, and I’m sure they will figure it out!
