Monday, November 03, 2003

Economist.com | The next hot internet stock: "How good is Google?

Most of the article follows as it is an excellent analysis of crucial issues.

Oct 30th 2003 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition"

kaluta asks: "The [0]Economist has a typically clear and concise [1]story about bringing Google to the stockmarket. Basically, is it going to be the next eBay or Amazon, or will it 'simply be the next overhyped share sale to make its founders rich only to wither away miserably, either for lack of a sustainably profitable business model, or, like Netscape, because it finds itself [2]in the path of that mighty wrecker,
Microsoft?' Cool picture too."

"customer searches (now 200m a day) ... Google has clearly been a runaway success. Not only is its own site the most popular for search on the web, but it also powers the search engines of major portals, such as Yahoo! and AOL. All told, 75% of referrals to websites now originate from Google's algorithms. That is power. "

Yahoo! which still has about half of the $2 billion-or-so market - bought Overture 2003...
The next step is to take this approach to advertising from the results pages of search engines and on to other web pages. Increasingly, web publishers—from hobby bloggers to small businesses—allow firms such as Google to crawl through the content of their pages and place relevant text advertisements in the right margin. Once page visitors click on the links, the webmasters share the revenues with Google. At a stroke, this so-called “contextual advertising” makes much of web publishing self-financing. This may result in better web content by making hitherto unprofitable online activities economically viable.

Meta Group, a consultancy, reckons that the market for paid search and other contextual advertising will grow to $5 billion by 2006. This is Google's main market opportunity (although it also gets some revenues from licensing its search technology). Currently, Google is thought to make annual profits of about $150m.
... That means matching such internet stars as eBay (market capitalisation $37 billion), but without the natural-monopoly advantages that have made eBay so dominant—the classic network effect of buyers and sellers knowing they do best by all trading in one place. For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little—only a bright idea by another set of geeks—to lose the lead. In contrast to a portal such as Yahoo!, which also offers customers free e-mail and other services, a pure search engine is always but a click away from losing users....
Yahoo!, in fact, will probably be the first to attack. It now owns rival search technologies including AltaVista, AlltheWeb and Inktomi. With the contextual-advertising technology of Overture, Yahoo! now has under its own roof all the elements of the business model that made Google such a success. It cannot be long before Yahoo! turns from a lucrative customer of Google's into a powerful rival...

Even more frightening (especially to those who remember Netscape's fate in the browser wars), Microsoft smells blood. It is currently working on its own search algorithm, which it hopes to make public early next year, around the probable time of Google's share listing. Historically, Microsoft has been good at letting others (Apple, Netscape, Real) pioneer a technology before taking over, exploiting its dominance in desktop operating systems.

Google the new-age advertising agency makes money, but it is Google the search engine that builds the consumer brand which makes the ad agency powerful. Whenever users click on advertisements on Google's own site, Google gets all the revenues. Whenever users stray to other search engines, even ones where Google has placed sponsored links, Google has to share the revenues with the site owner. As the competition between Google, Overture and others heats up, Google's profit margins will fall.

This may already be happening. Craig Pisaris-Henderson, the chief executive of FindWhat.com, a smaller rival to Overture and Google in contextual advertising, reckons that Google's operating margins on sites other than its own must be much worse than FindWhat.com's (23%) or Overture's (12%) because it has been wooing advertisers away from Overture by being more generous to webmasters.

One thing that might help against Microsoft, says Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, an online consumer guide to the industry, is Google's image of “niceness”—at least by implicit comparison with the forces of darkness in Redmond. Scott Banister, a pioneer of paid-search technology (and now a founder of IronPort, an e-mail infrastructure firm), thinks that Google has already built sufficiently deep networks with advertisers to mount an effective resistance to Microsoft's impending assault.

Even so, Google is no sure thing—as those who hope to sell its shares are no doubt aware. John Doerr and Michael Moritz, for instance, between them also brought Netscape and Yahoo! to market, and may remember their lessons. With luck, Google's owners will remember to work out a viable strategy for Google beyond the point at which they cash out.


After reading that I reckon a paid listing in Yahoo! has to be a total must... freee regional listings for the UK are no more.

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