Can Google get smart without the free-with-advertising model?

I love thinking forward, and being an ENTJ, can imagine all sorts of possibilities that others not only do not see, but when presented with them, say, "Hogwash!" Nonetheless, I have for better and for worse been an early adopter, in the vanguard, ahead of my time (choose your phraseology) most of my life.

So I was very curious when I read this article by Don Reisinger of cnet: If it can't find a solution, Google should kill YouTube. Thanks to my colleague Heath Parks for pointing me to this post.

He was discussing this quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, gave to Ken Auletta and posted in the New Yorker, discussing the struggle Google is having making money off their $1.65B purchase of YouTube.

The goal for YouTube is to build a tremendous community....In the case of YouTube we might be wrong. We have enough leverage that we have the leverage of time. We can invest for scale and not have to make money right now, he said. Hopefully our system and judgment is good enough if something is not going to pay out, we can change it.

Let's forget those temporary accounting tricks that indicated Google actually made money off the expenditure (October 6, 2006) because the price was offset by an increase in the stock price theoretically resulting from the purchase. (October 2, 2006: $420.50. October 16, 2006: $459.67.) Lemmings do not a sustainable model make, though they can drive up a stock price.

What matters is can Google continue to make money, and if it can't how does it reconcile what it owes its shareholders vs. what the marketplace of millions is demanding?

Schmidt goes on to say:

There is a tremendous amount of use of social networks...the traffic is phenomenal...and there will be advertising products in that context...it's taken longer for the industry to find those devices but they are clearly there....Our primary success was in the direct marketing piece that is quite measurable and tactical. The mobile case is just an extension of that. As mobile devices get more powerful you can do click to play ads. Mobile devices will be able to do powerful narratives...cameras, GPS...it will tell you need new pants.

It remains to be seen how much advertising in how many places people will be willing to tolerate for free content. Movie theaters added it, and attendance continues to decline year after year though video rentals and ticket price increases are keeping that industry afloat.

Many professional early adopters blog regularly about people's willingness to pay for ad-free and premium services. But there's a catch right - because it is the smarter richer people (who would pay) that advertisers generally want to reach, so there is a built-in catch 22 for startups who are creating their business models. There may not be enough paying customers whereas advertisers still seem willing to spend. Read the comments on this post to see the skepticism people hold for how many would actually signup to pay. As a result, companies (like Twitter) appear to be dragging their feet on implementing for-fee channels. We don't get much chance to either test this or build this over time.

Right now there is fascination and wonder in having these wide open spaces where anything goes and anyone can show up. Advertising per se certainly is facing as large a challenge as Detroit's auto industry. It's tough to see the gates unlocked and people running all over the field; making cars in Japan, Germany, and now India that are good enough or better than most. To see people telling each other what to buy and where to buy it instead of being captives of marketplace manipulation.

Schmidt says, Frankly, the free service model with free advertising is still the best model. Do you agree? I think younger people are seeing through advertising and we have a revolt of some sort in the making. They may be wiring their brains to ignore it more than ever, while others may be forming a basis for radical rejection of the manipulation of advertising, along the lines of the 60's radical rejection of the Vietnam War.

Check out this 10th Grade Project on Persuasion or Manipulation: Thinking About Advertising

Would not Google be a great company (who has the brains and the cash) to start building some innovative business models that allow people to pay for improved user experience? Might the early adopters then be able to help shape a new economy? Might we actually develop beyond the lowest common denominators of free, advertising-sponsored and advertising-despised models of transacting with each other?

Calling all forward thinkers to weigh in on this with me.

Use Google to Find Local Movie Listings

I used to be a fan of Fandango but Shane just told me about using Google to check listings.

It is so fast and easy. Go to google.com/movies and enter your zip code. Next up is a theatre and movie listing, starting with the venue closest to you, and moving out.

Displays show times, ratings, and a link to IMDB to each movie. This is the movie database that lists the actors, story line, etc - great for film fans. There is also a link to the trailer, a map to the theatre (Google Maps of course) and all this is displayed in lean google fashion.

Click on the small graphic to see it full size.

I Wanna Be #1 on Google!

We hear this a lot. And it’s a worthy goal. But do you know what it really takes to get there? Here are some of the considerations for getting high rankings on Google.

Preliminary Note: You don't have to go through Google to get places on the internet.

We've observed a lot of people go to Google, then type in their own web site and wait for Google to bring it up. Then they click through to go the web site. Some newbie web users think you have to go through Google to get anywhere on the Internet. Others have not grown comfortable with the address bar in the web browser window. Sometimes we audaciously suggest typing in the web site address directly and saving it as favorite for a one-click visit in the future. More than once we've heard, "No, I like going to Google." I must say we don't understand this, but we've observed it too many times to pretend it is not a real behavior.

Having valid, quality links to your site is the most important thing you can do to get good rankings on Google.

h3. Search Engine Primer: How do I get in a search engine?

Each search engine has robots and spiders that are software programs crawling the web. They follow links from web page to web page and then index or file what they find into massive databases. You want to build your site so that it is accessible to these automated programs. And you want to build your private web areas so they are not accessible to these programs.

There are over 8 billion pages on the internet.

A July 2000 Cyveillance' study estimates that the Internet is growing at a rate of more than 7 million pages per day.

It takes time after your site has launched before the bots and spiders will find you and store you in their databases. Be patient! Or go directly to Google to submit your site.

First: How do you want to be found on Google?

Google is a search engine. You type one or more words into the search bar and Google returns any number of guesses for what it thinks you want. Those words you type in are called "search terms" and/or "keywords." Some search terms are incredibly competitive, as there are many businesses who want to be number one for that phrase.

Think about "home mortgage." Then think about how many web sites are in the business of selling home mortgages. Then think about the budget some of them have to pay to get top rankings on Google. Depending on your search term and the size of your business, it may not be realistic to expect top rankings for very generic, very competitive search terms.

Second: What search terms are within your reach for top rankings?

All is not lost! You can aim to be found by your company name, especially when combined with a local search. Let's say "ABC Home Mortgage" and "Albuquerque." Those are more specific, and would be a much better search query if say, someone heard you speak at Rotary and wanted to check you out, but did not have a business card or did not know your web site address.

You'll want to have your company name mentioned in real text on your home page and you'll want to have your City and State and/or geographic service area also listed in the home page text.

Third: What if that still isn't working?

Google is an incredibly competitive space. Even when you do things "right," you may not make it on the first few pages. It may be you have a common name in a crowded space. It may mean your site is too small to get noticed. It may mean the structure of your site prevents Google from easily finding you. It may mean your site is too new for Google to have found you yet and placed you in its database.

Fourth: What are the most important things for you to do to get on Google?

• Make sure your site structure is inviting to the search engines. You can listen to our podcast on the topic here.
• Aim for at least 50 pages on your site. Content is king and the more you have, the more the search engines will pay attention to you. The more current the content, the better. The more specific the content, the better.
• Be sure to list your company name, your keywords, and your geographic location on the home page.
• Look at your site statistics and see what search terms people are using at Google to get to your site. Then be sure to add those phrases to your web site content. Obviously, you have to get some history on your site before this tip will be useful.
• Generate high quality links to your site from other sites. This is easy of you start commenting on related blogs and web sites, write articles about your specialty for other web sites, and ask others in your industry to mention you on their web sites. Having valid, quality links to your site is the most important thing you can do to get good rankings on Google. If enough people link to you, you can have very few pages and break a lot of the other rules because Google looks at what other people value when deciding how to rank you.
• Update your site so it is using the newest Web 2.0 software, enabling your site to "ping" other sites when you post new content. You can learn more in this podcast.
• Register your site with Technorati and consider adding Technorati tags to your pages, as I have done at the end of this post.

When You're Ready For Professional Help

We've helped many companies get top 3 listings on Google and Yahoo for very competitive search terms. You can read more here about our services.

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Google Buys Urchin

Google announced late Monday afternoon (March 28th, 2005) that it had reached an agreement with Urchin to buy the web analytics company. We can’t wait to see what the power and deep pockets of Google have in store for our favorite web stats reporting software.

Here's one of my favorite articles on the purchase.

Over the years, we at Bare Feet Studios have tried many web site traffic analysis packages. They've run the gammut from free packages like Webalizer that are provided or installed by most hosting providers, up to the true enterprise-level packages such as WebTrends and Urchin. In the early days, packages such as WebTrends required that you add code to each and every page on which you wanted to gather statistical information. While that in itself was quite a pain, the real problem came when the WebTrends servers were down or responding slowly. See, the way it worked was that each time a user requested one of the pages on your site, the code that you had to paste into each page actually had to connect to the WebTrends servers and "log" a hit as well as gather additional information about the visitor, their browser, what page or site they had previously visited, etc. Much like the same problems with ad tracking sites like DoubleClick, when the servers that tracked these hits were busy or down, your web page would fail to load.

This never really made any sense to us. The web server software, Apache is our web server of choice, keeps a very detailed log of all access and activity. Other packages on the market at that time, like Urchin and FunnelWeb (it was an early stats package that ran on Macintosh servers) instead were installed on the server, or on a server in your local network, and would read the contents of these server logs into memory once a day (or as many times as you want to configure them to) and then spit out a very detailed and expansive series of reports that could be sorted and viewed in almost any way imaginable. Very early on we decided to go this route and to not leave our client's websites at the mercy of some other server out there and just hope that it wasn't too busy at the moment to deal with our hits. WebTrends did see the problem and moved to create a series of packages that could be purchased and that will run on your local network. But we found their products to be very unfriendly, unweildly, and expensive for what you actually got.

So, for the past 5-6 years we have been offering enterprise-level Urchin statistical website traffic reporting FREE to our clients who host with us. We feel that understanding the traffic patterns on your site are just as important as getting good placement on the search engines. It doesn't matter if you have a top 10 or top 5 placement on Google if your visitors can't find what they are looking for when they get to your site. Helping our clients understand the traffic patterns that develop on their sites is one of the important and surprisingly educational services we offer.

You might know how many hits or sessions your site registered yesterday. Do you know if your site visitors found what they were looking for?