DISQUS

dbarefoot · 1 year ago

Google just keeps driving down the price of web-based services, eh? The latest one was surveys. I just tried the survey functionality in Google Docs, and it works fairly well. I thought to myself, 'adios, SurveyMonkey et al'.

Besides, I'll bet that Google does a better job than comScore and Compete--their results were often utter bollocks.

Ed Lee · 1 year ago

something that i hardly ever seen mentioned is that google's "devotion to free services" is not because of the huge pile of cash it generates on an hourly basis. on the contrary, the majority of services google releases or buys is geared to increasing the size of the pile.

for instance:

if i'm an e-commerce Web site owner, and i sign up for free analytics, i can put a price on my traffic, based on conversions. when traffic has a price, i'm now more likely to try to buy traffic using AdWords

the more blogs there are in the world (blogger.com), the more content needs to be indexed and the more competition there is around key words. now as a marketer, in order to ensure i'm top of the pile when it comes to people searching for my key terms, i buy them.

similarly, the more marketers know about the Web, and its metric driven effectiveness, the more they will spend on AdWords to attract new users and new customers.

ed

mathewi · 1 year ago

That's a good point, Ed -- and something I meant to note in my post.
It's not just the fact that Google *can* offer things for free, but
also that offering those things produces demand for other things
(namely advertising) that the company makes money on. In a lot of
ways, it's an example of Mike Masnick's "economics of abundance"
theory -- give away the things that are abundant and free (or can be
made abundant and free), and use that to drive demand for things that
aren't.

antje · 1 year ago

wait a minute.... if I use google analytics in my site, this stupid pop up i keep getting every time I log in now asking me if i want to share my data (to which I always vehemently click "no no no") they are going to just share my data with anyone who wants it?

I'm noticing issues with google analytics NOT matching my own database data (google analytics has worse numbers). So they're going to share this crap data with others??

mathewi · 1 year ago

Ah, that would be a "yes" to both, Antje :-) Although Google says
that they won't share that data with any personal info attached, and
it is all aggregated and whatnot -- but generally speaking, yes, I
think that's the idea.

antje · 1 year ago

that SUCKS. Am I the only one who doesn't want accurate site stats flashed to the world? I wonder if people will leave google Analytics now b/c of that, so no one can be sure if the google Ad Planner is accurate or not (creating the same problem as currently exists). I realize mostly smaller companies will be more worried about this vs. the facebooks of the world, but it still feels really violative (is that a word?) since they own such a large portion of the REAL analytics market.... I don't know. I just feel this should be a private communciation between a site and its advertisers.

antje · 1 year ago

Ok TechCrunch says: 'underlying data—”aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.” If that sounds kind of vague it is because it is. '

I was afraid they were going to make this mandatory... good