3 ms·

Google Stops Print Ads Program

5 points by pclark 18y ago

AndrewWarner 18y ago
Could anyone here explain how this fit in with Google's mission?
- enomar 18y ago
  While their state mission might be "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible", I'm pretty sure public companies are obligated to do what's best for their shareholders. In this case, I think they were trying to make money ;)
  - tome 18y ago
    > public companies are obligated to do what's best for their shareholders I hear this a lot. Do you have a reference for that, particularly one which explains which definition of "best" is used?
    - fallentimes 18y ago
      Especially since what's "best" in the short term is different than what's "best" in the long term.
      - tome 18y ago
        Quite, and my main problem with it is that although "best" may be well defined, the path to "best" may be very uncertain.
    - enomar 18y ago
      That's a good question. I'm guilty here of throwing around "common knowledge" without knowing the actual facts. Thanks for calling me on it :) I have only heard that officers and directors of public companies have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders. Whether that obligation is legal or philosophical, I'm not sure. Doing a quick search here, I found little information pertaining to any legal requirements, but there are several cases of shareholders suing a company for not meeting their fiduciary duties. Based on that, it seem like there is some legal basis for this, but IANAL.
  - AndrewWarner 18y ago
    Don't companies that stick to their mission make more money than companies that try anything to make a buck?
  - known 18y ago
    Isn't it time to regulate market capitalization (not more than 2 times quarterly revenue) of listed companies?
- ntoshev 18y ago
  Newspapers print ads that contain information, if Google could optimize the ad placement relative to content that would be a better organization. The biggest problems with this seems to be that it is not measurable whether you really improved placement or not.
keltecp11 18y ago
Was this due to the recession or was this due to Google not conducting the right research?
- mdasen 18y ago
  Probably a combination of things. 1. The newspaper industry is just doing really poorly which means there is little money to be had there. So, this program, not greatly connected to Google's main business, also probably wouldn't make a lot of money. 2. Traditional ads (TV/newspaper) differ from web ads. With the web, you're trying to automatically place ads for an infinite variety of content and users. With traditional ads, you're placing one ad for every user and there's a finite amount of content. So, all of Google's techniques for web advertising have little to do with traditional ads. 3. What kind of research can you do? Like, with web ads, people can look at impression to click ratio of the ad placed next to many different content; impression to click of 100 variations of the ad; click to sale based on all those conditions. Traditional ads you really only get circumstantial evidence (ie. we ran 100 ads this week and sales went up 5%, therefore 100 ads raises sales 5% - which, clearly isn't good evidence since that change could have been caused by any number of things). Sure, sometimes they say, go to dell.com/tv-offer-8, but how many people do that rather than going to dell.com? Google's success is having computers do the work for them. They measure things analytically and mine data. Unfortunately, the traditional market isn't based on data. Rather, it's based on intuition - this ad makes our product look cool. Sometimes they back the intuition with quasi-data like focus groups, but that's not a Google thing. Google mines hard quantitative data, they don't intuit, they don't do qualitative data. I'm not saying that the others are worse, just that it isn't Google's realm and therefore it just doesn't fit Google in the way that web ads do. Google is great at a few very important things. They don't have great ideas on how to revolutionize everything. If there isn't a lot of data to analyze or something that needs a ton of computing power, Google's unlikely to have a great solution to your problem.

5 points by pclark 18y ago

AndrewWarner 18y ago

Could anyone here explain how this fit in with Google's mission?

enomar 18y ago
While their state mission might be "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible", I'm pretty sure public companies are obligated to do what's best for their shareholders. In this case, I think they were trying to make money ;)
- tome 18y ago
  > public companies are obligated to do what's best for their shareholders I hear this a lot. Do you have a reference for that, particularly one which explains which definition of "best" is used?
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    Especially since what's "best" in the short term is different than what's "best" in the long term.
    - tome 18y ago
      Quite, and my main problem with it is that although "best" may be well defined, the path to "best" may be very uncertain.
  - enomar 18y ago
    That's a good question. I'm guilty here of throwing around "common knowledge" without knowing the actual facts. Thanks for calling me on it :) I have only heard that officers and directors of public companies have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders. Whether that obligation is legal or philosophical, I'm not sure. Doing a quick search here, I found little information pertaining to any legal requirements, but there are several cases of shareholders suing a company for not meeting their fiduciary duties. Based on that, it seem like there is some legal basis for this, but IANAL.
- AndrewWarner 18y ago
  Don't companies that stick to their mission make more money than companies that try anything to make a buck?
- known 18y ago
  Isn't it time to regulate market capitalization (not more than 2 times quarterly revenue) of listed companies?
ntoshev 18y ago
Newspapers print ads that contain information, if Google could optimize the ad placement relative to content that would be a better organization. The biggest problems with this seems to be that it is not measurable whether you really improved placement or not.

keltecp11 18y ago

Was this due to the recession or was this due to Google not conducting the right research?

mdasen 18y ago
Probably a combination of things. 1. The newspaper industry is just doing really poorly which means there is little money to be had there. So, this program, not greatly connected to Google's main business, also probably wouldn't make a lot of money. 2. Traditional ads (TV/newspaper) differ from web ads. With the web, you're trying to automatically place ads for an infinite variety of content and users. With traditional ads, you're placing one ad for every user and there's a finite amount of content. So, all of Google's techniques for web advertising have little to do with traditional ads. 3. What kind of research can you do? Like, with web ads, people can look at impression to click ratio of the ad placed next to many different content; impression to click of 100 variations of the ad; click to sale based on all those conditions. Traditional ads you really only get circumstantial evidence (ie. we ran 100 ads this week and sales went up 5%, therefore 100 ads raises sales 5% - which, clearly isn't good evidence since that change could have been caused by any number of things). Sure, sometimes they say, go to dell.com/tv-offer-8, but how many people do that rather than going to dell.com? Google's success is having computers do the work for them. They measure things analytically and mine data. Unfortunately, the traditional market isn't based on data. Rather, it's based on intuition - this ad makes our product look cool. Sometimes they back the intuition with quasi-data like focus groups, but that's not a Google thing. Google mines hard quantitative data, they don't intuit, they don't do qualitative data. I'm not saying that the others are worse, just that it isn't Google's realm and therefore it just doesn't fit Google in the way that web ads do. Google is great at a few very important things. They don't have great ideas on how to revolutionize everything. If there isn't a lot of data to analyze or something that needs a ton of computing power, Google's unlikely to have a great solution to your problem.