What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [35]
It isn’t all bad. The leveling of the playing field the internet and Google engineered also made it possible for a tiny store selling a niche product to find its ideal customer or for a mere blogger to swim alongside big, old media. But in that process, it’s ironic that our unique identities, personalities, brands, qualifications, interests, relationships, and reputations as publishers—the values the internet enables—can be lost even as we can be found via Google.
What do we do about the threat of commodification? One smart response is to play by Google’s rules and take Google’s money as About.com has done. Or you can join networks with other specialized niches to reach critical mass, as Glam.com has done. Or get people to link to you and talk about you because you’re just so damned good, as Apple does. Or place your ads on highly targeted sites where you know your customers are, sponsoring that mommy blog with free baby food for loyal readers. Develop a deep relationship with your constituents so they come back to you directly, not just through Google search but by using social services such as Facebook. Serve the niche well rather than the mass badly.
Welcome to the Google economy
In April 2008, just as America was diving into recession, Google announced another amazing and profitable quarter. The New York Times story was headlined, “Google defies economy.” It should have read, “Google defines economy.”
Old definitions of our economy measured the performance of big companies and their impact on each other (see: the Dow Jones Industrial Average). Media and advertising served only large companies because only they could afford to advertise in large outlets. Manufacturers could get retail space only if they operated under the economies of scale. That was the mass economy. Then Google’s marketplace for advertisers of all sizes introduced the small-is-the-new-big ecosystem, the mass-of-niches economy.
That Google’s advertising is run in an auction marketplace means that its economy is more fluid; it fills in voids. When an economic downturn affects, say, travel, a magazine such as Condé Nast Traveler will suffer—airlines and resorts will advertise less and there aren’t more big advertisers to fill the gap at Traveler’s price. But on Google, if American Airlines and the Ritz aren’t buying the keyword “Paris” this month, other advertisers may buy it. The price of that keyword may decline with demand, but in Google’s very broad economy, the prices of other keywords (e.g., “foreclosure” and “credit”) may rise.
This practically unlimited supply of advertisers in a fluid marketplace appears to be a new economic model that may insulate Google from some of the dynamics of an economy built on mass and scarcity. Google has its own economy.
Google also reflects our new and emerging economic reality. In the financial meltdown that reached full flame in the fall of 2008, we saw not just the failure of mortgages, derivatives, banks, and regulation. We saw the dawn of a new economy that could best be viewed and understood through the lens of Google, the one company that—by design or by luck—was built for the emerging world order. As banks, companies, and even nations faltered, Google still announced profits rising 26 percent.
In Google’s economy, companies will no longer grow to critical mass by borrowing massive capital to make massive acquisitions—at least not for the foreseeable future. Instead, they need to learn from Google and grow by building platforms to help others prosper. Indeed, growth will come less from owning assets inside one company and amassing risk there than from enabling others in a network to build their own value, reducing their cost, and spreading their risk. That is Google’s way.
New Business Reality
Atoms are a drag
Middlemen are doomed
Free is a business