http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2007/04/04/googles-big-mistake/ Double True! Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:42:11 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2007/04/04/googles-big-mistake/comment-page-1/#comment-13977 James Mon, 07 May 2007 15:27:05 +0000 http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=212#comment-13977 As Google increasing pursues ad revenue in as many forms as possible - some with remarkable innovation, others not so much - the trick is whether they'll continue to be a genuine market leader. There's a risk here, a rut to fall into, a very attractive and well proven model: Television, which makes TV ads an easy fit. Content that is made available to audience, generally at zero customer cost, for the sake of delivering advertising. Swap out the sitcoms and news shows for net content; old-school cable costs for ISP charges; the 30 second spot for Adwords; exclusive programming for increasingly google-branded content. The concept of media convergence around a single digital pipe and access channel is a simple one, but the competition between TV and Internet content is fierce enough to prevent it from happening for real in the marketplace: the competition for eyeballs - a very old fight dating back to the early days of broadcast. A rip-and-replace solution may be the real battleground, since crossover content, by and large, has been parasitic. The mistake that Google could be making here could either be to follow in the footsteps of traditional broadcast media, or it could be to undermine their own battleground for media channel supremacy, the key to continued growth of ad revenues. That said, none of this would be possible without the continued pursuit of their public, consumer-level mission. I'm waiting to see whether Google continues to evolve into something new, or rather something far, far more familiar. As Google increasing pursues ad revenue in as many forms as possible – some with remarkable innovation, others not so much – the trick is whether they’ll continue to be a genuine market leader. There’s a risk here, a rut to fall into, a very attractive and well proven model: Television, which makes TV ads an easy fit. Content that is made available to audience, generally at zero customer cost, for the sake of delivering advertising. Swap out the sitcoms and news shows for net content; old-school cable costs for ISP charges; the 30 second spot for Adwords; exclusive programming for increasingly google-branded content. The concept of media convergence around a single digital pipe and access channel is a simple one, but the competition between TV and Internet content is fierce enough to prevent it from happening for real in the marketplace: the competition for eyeballs – a very old fight dating back to the early days of broadcast. A rip-and-replace solution may be the real battleground, since crossover content, by and large, has been parasitic. The mistake that Google could be making here could either be to follow in the footsteps of traditional broadcast media, or it could be to undermine their own battleground for media channel supremacy, the key to continued growth of ad revenues. That said, none of this would be possible without the continued pursuit of their public, consumer-level mission. I’m waiting to see whether Google continues to evolve into something new, or rather something far, far more familiar.

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