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Given that Alphabet has 686.56M outstanding shares at the moment, this research firm believes that Google's market cap will go from it's current $495B to $137B.

by TheBiv 10y ago

rbinv 10y ago
This "research firm" has been super bearish with regards to Google/Alphabet and is obviously short. All of this "adocalypse" talk seems somewhat overblown. Besides, even if Google's display ad business went to zero, it would certainly not exactly kill 3/4 of their revenue and/or profits (because there's still all the search ad business).
AJ007 10y ago
I'm not connecting the dots because everything they wrote in that article is good for Google if it ends. Ad dollars that would be spent at Google are being burned on ad exchanges and content recommendation ad networks. Google's introduction of AMP looks to me like a direct attack on Taboola and the ad exchanges. You can read a lot of major news outlets now without your mobile phone choking. Google's fraud department is very aggressive. Publishers maybe get away with sending low quality traffic through to Adsense/Doubleclick for a while, but traffic brokers will mix fraudulent traffic in, only Google will catch it, and then the publisher ends up with a very large negative account balance. There are some separate issues with very bad quality sites and mobile apps ending up in Google's platform. This wasn't the case years ago. Much of it is from sites with buzz and viral in the domains and is coming from Facebook. It is real, but the clicks are maybe 100% accidental and the smart pricing algorithms are not punishing it like they should. The correct conclusion of this article is that media publishers who have relied on huge volumes of un-targeted, non-retaining, mediocre traffic with shitloads of display ads/auto play video ads/etc are running out of time. The platforms which serve them may be over valued by a lot. Google+Youtube and Facebook are the big winners. The ad dollar share will shift back to them. They can deliver ads through their mobile apps in a way that is not easily blockable even at the network level. Future ads delivered through voice interfaces (Siri, Alexa) and messaging platforms (Snapchat, FB Messenger) are going to make ad blocking more of a non-issue as content & ad blend together. Maybe at some point you stick a Magic Leap in your eyeball and an AI auto-blocks anything suspected to be paid for to your retina while noise cancelling headphones kill the audio stream, but that isn't a near-future issue for now. There is a whole separate issue regarding Google's increasing replacement of organic results with basically just ads. Google may be in a very, very tight position to meet their quarterly numbers and could start missing.

Given that Alphabet has 686.56M outstanding shares at the moment, this research firm believes that Google's market cap will go from it's current $495B to $137B.

by TheBiv 10y ago

Given that Alphabet has 686.56M outstanding shares at the moment, this research firm believes that Google's market cap will go from it's current $495B to $137B.

rbinv 10y ago

This "research firm" has been super bearish with regards to Google/Alphabet and is obviously short. All of this "adocalypse" talk seems somewhat overblown. Besides, even if Google's display ad business went to zero, it would certainly not exactly kill 3/4 of their revenue and/or profits (because there's still all the search ad business).

AJ007 10y ago

I'm not connecting the dots because everything they wrote in that article is good for Google if it ends. Ad dollars that would be spent at Google are being burned on ad exchanges and content recommendation ad networks. Google's introduction of AMP looks to me like a direct attack on Taboola and the ad exchanges. You can read a lot of major news outlets now without your mobile phone choking. Google's fraud department is very aggressive. Publishers maybe get away with sending low quality traffic through to Adsense/Doubleclick for a while, but traffic brokers will mix fraudulent traffic in, only Google will catch it, and then the publisher ends up with a very large negative account balance. There are some separate issues with very bad quality sites and mobile apps ending up in Google's platform. This wasn't the case years ago. Much of it is from sites with buzz and viral in the domains and is coming from Facebook. It is real, but the clicks are maybe 100% accidental and the smart pricing algorithms are not punishing it like they should. The correct conclusion of this article is that media publishers who have relied on huge volumes of un-targeted, non-retaining, mediocre traffic with shitloads of display ads/auto play video ads/etc are running out of time. The platforms which serve them may be over valued by a lot. Google+Youtube and Facebook are the big winners. The ad dollar share will shift back to them. They can deliver ads through their mobile apps in a way that is not easily blockable even at the network level. Future ads delivered through voice interfaces (Siri, Alexa) and messaging platforms (Snapchat, FB Messenger) are going to make ad blocking more of a non-issue as content & ad blend together. Maybe at some point you stick a Magic Leap in your eyeball and an AI auto-blocks anything suspected to be paid for to your retina while noise cancelling headphones kill the audio stream, but that isn't a near-future issue for now. There is a whole separate issue regarding Google's increasing replacement of organic results with basically just ads. Google may be in a very, very tight position to meet their quarterly numbers and could start missing.