Category Archives: google

cuban takes on gootube

Posted by Todd Sawicki on March 7, 2007 View Comments

Mashable covers the story here and comes to the conclusion that mark’s personal feelings are driving magnolia’s decision to go after youtube users.

Two things come to mind – who cares if its personal? Mark’s business has the right to do what they are doing and they are doing it.

I’ve had the chance to meet Mark and he’s one shrewd cookie – too bad Martin wasn’t able to sell then encoding.com (later known as loudeye recently sold in parts to Nokia and Muze) way back when. We were close but then mark had to go and sell broadcast.com to yahoo. bastard ;-)

Personally my bet is that Mark’s doing it to either prove or disprove the legal standing the gootube is using to avoid content licensing deals with content owners. And as a content owner, Mark’s right.

The bigger question to me is why didn’t Mark follow his own advice and flood gootube with promo videos for magnolia’s content like he explains here.

google is the man.

Posted by Todd Sawicki on March 2, 2007 View Comments

According to the IAB, Internet ad spending topped $4.2 billion for q3 2006. What’s amazing is that Google accounted for $2.7 billion or 65% of the market for online ad spending! Wow.

What’s interesting about that stat is Google only represents about 10 billion page views out of the roughly 1.5 trillion total monthly page views according to UBS/ComScore. So Google’s 0.67% market share of page views pulled in 65% of the ad dollars.

For comparison, MySpace’s top rank with 50+ billion page views per month is supposedly bringing in a whooping $75 million a quarter. At least Yahoo’s 50 billion page views per month are bringing in something closer to Google at $1.6 billion (yep 40% less dollars with 5x more traffic!).  Facebook is brining in $200 million a year from MSFT so that’s $50 million a quarter with approximately 10 billion page views a month.

MySpace and Facebook together drive `5% of all page views online. Yep 1 out of every page view is a MySpace or Facebook page view.  Rollin Youtube, Flickr, etc. and I have to believe you are looking at 20-25% of overall internet traffic easy (and likely a lot more).  Too bad that social media traffic is a royal PITA to monetize.

At this point, when it comes to making money online, Google is the man.

So when does Google get sued for antitrust violations?

Posted by Todd Sawicki on February 27, 2007 View Comments

History often repeats itself. In the history of computing – first you had IBM getting sued for antitrust, then Microsoft, and you have to wonder if Google is next.

Google, america’s superstar business du jour, just won a lawsuit allowing it to reject ads from companies it does not want to do business with. Some people would applaud Google saying Google is helping police the Internet (I would argue who elected Google town sheriff but I digress). That is all fine and well today, but as Google continues to grow its marketshare in search advertising and other forms of advertising – video, radio, print, etc. – the reality of getting sued a la IBM and Microsoft increases everyday. In fact, I do not believe if Google will be sued for antitrust by the DoJ, I think the question is when. That’s because as the number of companies Google rejects increases, the pool of pissed of companies who just might sue increases.

First off, I think it’s important to understand that monopolies are not illegal. What’s illegal is using a monopoly for anticompetitive purposes. Effectively the rules change once you become a monopoly or get accused of being one – you can no longer be as capricious, arbitrary or as aggresive as you once were. Just ask Microsoft.

How does this impact Google and their court victory? Today thanks to the court ruling, Google can discriminate against companies it doesn’t want to do business without reason or explanation. As a monopolist or someone accused of being one who settles with a consent decree overseen by a judge or the FTC, Google will only be able to discriminate within the bounds of the rules set by their regulators.

Google because of it’s search and search advertising dominance – not dissimilar to Microsoft’s share of the desktop pc OS market in the late 80′s and early 90′s – holds incredible power over the online ecosystem. Google is a gatekeeper and could become so dominant that it is THE gatekeeper. Some would argue they already are – and as someone who has a lot of experience using Google’s advertising platforms – I would tend to agree. And when someone losses their business because Google decides they don’t like them well you can imagine some companies will fight back the same way Sun, Netscape and Real Networks did against Microsoft.

Be careful Google and enjoy the competitive freedom while it lasts.