Google Hype -- Bubblemania or supported by sound business fundamentals?
 

Why is it that if Google announces new services that are similar to prior companies' services many market observers wet themselves? Example: Xdrive.com provides online storage solutions for users' files. Google's version: http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/07/goo...acescan08.html
Xdrive.com suffered some severe financial tightening around 2001 due to the weakness of its business model to produce profit.

Although I can understand that Google's HUGE user base can jumpstart the profitability of otherwise dubious business models, is there a double standard at play here? Is there a rational basis for the Google euphoria (at least when it comes to new products/services not additions to their solid search and ad targetting technologies)?

Google is financially sound, it has its adwords / adsense as its primary business model. Even if its new spinoff businesses don't yield a dime, its still plausible to continue their operations to increase distribution of its PPC business.

In my opinion, most of these new projects are not intended for profit. It would be nice obviously, but its still fundamentally based on adwords/adsense.
WG

two big gorillas are about to enter the scene - driving down margins on keyword bids. i see people on message boards claiming that Yahoo is paying out more than adsense right now. yahoo is probably taking a loss on each click to poach current adsense publishers. they do this in some of their other lines of business as well.

I feel Google has a solid structure, but it is highly overinflated.

Please drop the names so people can do some research.:thumbsup

will that get me booted from GFY?

If they are just sponsors, not banned from GFY, and are not linked to any webmaster board, I don't see why sharing the urls would get you banned. Are these offshoots of established mainstream PPC companies like DoubleClick, etc?

I thought he meant MSN and Yahoo's ad service similar to Google.

You can compare it with ebay, ebay is also just a script that generates money. Ebay also started with new things like opening shipping centers in different parts of the us. Both of them have lots of money not only because of ad words or auction fees but from their stocks.
I do think google is a bigger bubble then ebay, ebay is more solid as a marketplace, actual goods pass trough ebay but google is all about clicking on ads, when a new and better system comes up or a better search engine google will be finished in a short amount of time.

Let's say some kid invents a new browser, way better and faster than explorer or firefox, the browser is free but uses a sort of adwords in a build in task bar, you are on a page with baby clothing and the taskbar is showing you ads for babyclothing. Advertisers will place their ads trough this new browser instead of using google and google will lose it's entire adwords income.

Sounds like a good idea to get rich, now I only need to find a kid to make this new fenomenal browser :-)

That's their Achilles heel. The overdependence on one revenue stream--ads. The paid/private labeled search engine technology service isn't as big as Adsense. Basically, this foray into "other models" is Google's version of Yahoo's earlier efforts to wean itself off ad revenue. Good timing too since any ad market slow down would definitely ream them the same way Yahoo suffered in 2000 to 2003 thereabouts.

he was saying "about to enter the scene" -- Yahoo/Overture has been on the PPC scene since day one (overture formerly known as Goto.com). MSN has already launched their PPC system. I was assuming from the wording that these will be new entrants.

So you do not think that Google is "the new tech saviour" of the world? :upsidedow

oh, sorry. i was referring to Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo has a publisher network already rolled out (YPN). MSFT will roll out its own as well. each PPC network will try to attract advertisers with cheaper keywords. but it's only useful if they have the traffic (publisher network). so they need to get the current adsense users to migrate to YPN

a few people i have talked to have said that Yahoo was paying out more than adsense (don't know if this is still the case). the goal (as always) is - traffic. advertisers need traffic, and right now google is dominating the network publisher market. so yahoo is trying to attract current adsense publishers (probably) by losing money on clicks. they do this in other businesses.

for instance - google pays adsense publishers something like 78% of each click. what if yahoo started paying out 105% for each click and lose money on each click. adsense users would migrate to YPN. then YPN can slowlythrottle the payout down and get paid back. check out their music service. i've heard that they take a hit on each subscription to musicnet. they offer the service for like 2 bucks less than other publishers selling music-on-demand.

who knows. i have no definitve proof to back this up, so take it for what it's worth.

sure. they each have had an 'adwords' type of service, but not a publisher network service like 'adsense'. goog still owns that market.

While I do think that MSN and Yahoo is becoming a threat, let's remember that Google was the 2nd to market with their PPC engine. Yahoo had quite a head start but Google did a much better job mainly because of their ability to leverage contextual advertising, namely adsense. Now that YPN is in beta and MSN is crawling as well, I do think they'll take a chunk out of Google, but I don't think they'll topple the market share to the point where Google has to worry.
WG

It's mostly hype, they don't really have much going for them besides a pretty decent search engine... a competitor releasing better search engine would kill them pretty fast... on the other hand they have a lot of talent, so they could be cooking up a unix based OS X like operating system for the pc, when they release it, they could take up significant market share away from windows... Or they could do 50 other breakthrough things, but unfortunatly everything released from google since they went public has been pretty lame...