John Battelle released an interesting post about Google's future direction over the next year as discussed in a Financial Analysts meeting yesterday.
- 1) Breakthroughs Likely in Branded Advertising Over the Next Year;
- 2) No Plans to Introduce a Browser at the Moment;
- 3) Google Base Won’t Be A Large Separate Site;
- 4) Wi-fi Deployment Effort To Increase Usage of Google;
- 5) Behavioral Targeting Holds More Promise Than Demographic Targeting;
- 6) Rising Competition Should Benefit Google and Yahoo / Keyword Prices Should Continue to Rise;
- 7) Quality Scores Are Keyword Based Only / Testing Improvements to Current Model;
- 8) Dell Deal to Be Cash Positive to Google Over the Term of the Contract;
- 9) Local Search is a Significant Portion of Their Business;
- 10) Traction in China and Korea Will Take Time.
A couple of interesting points: Google had been rumored to be developing it's own browser to defeat Microsoft's IE; but it's probably not going to happen this year.
Wi-Fi is probably going to become a much bigger part of Google's revenues once it's patents to use use AdWords in a local, geotargeted fashion across WiFi networks (and from that point of view - buying a lot of bandwidth and wiring up cities for free WiFi makes a lot of sense - for Google will use this bandwidth to stream their own advertising - it's coming ....maybe this year.
Behavioral Targeting vs. Demographic Targeting - it seems that Google is saying that it places more stock on Behavioral targeting (show ads based on how people react vs who they are and what audience they are part of). In a way, Microsoft is betting all it's cards (i think) on the Demographics side with AdCenter while Google, clearly does not want to put so much in Demographics and would find it easier to go with Behavioral targeting as it's just more code for their programmers to produce and ... boom...you now have Behavioral Targeting.
Keyword prices continue to rise - no surprise here - they will rise for some time yet.
Quality Scores for Keywords - that's interesting but I don't know much about it - Honestly, I'd like to know more and if anyone who reads Webmetricsguru.com knows more, please comment on what they thing the Quality Scores are and how they're derived.
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