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Several years ago, a person deep inside GOOG told me that the company had a secret knob that they could turn to increase revenues. He didn't go into details, bu
by xhkkffbf 6y ago
Several years ago, a person deep inside GOOG told me that the company had a secret knob that they could turn to increase revenues. He didn't go into details, but I concluded that it had something to do with the ad auction pricing. This could be that "dial".
Perhaps it's just a reference to Fed policy snoozery, but the helicopter connection seems like a better fit to me.
- lupire 6y agoRaising prices isn't really a "secret knob".
- extropy 6y agoIt is however very suspicious knob if most of the spending is automated. To attempt an anology, consider if all phone calls where charged by the minute and there is a knob to adjust the pricing. One cal argue it's a reasonable tool to have. You can turn the knob up to "print money". Or you can turn it up to survive in a time when number of phone calls goes significantly down and you need to cover the fixed expenses. If the price is too low you are leaving money on the table. If the price is too high users will see the costs surpassing the benefits and move to other products. Why not take all the money the market will bear?
- toast0 6y agoI'm sure they could adjust the auction pricing, but they could also increase the size of ads (either more ads, or bigger text) on the search result page (or other high traffic pages). Many moons ago, at Yahoo Travel we had a few requests to boost revenue near the end of the quarter; adding a third text ad works, but you don't really want to keep it because it reduces the utility of the page.