Marketing Ninja

Google has conducted a lot of business transactions lately that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, initially.

Here’s a quick list of some of Google’s recent key acquisitions, in no particular order.

• In October, 2007 they acquired Jaiku, a Twitter clone, for $30 million dollars. (I liked the Uncov article better than the TechCrunch/Mashable ones.)
• In June, 2007 Google acquired FeedBurner, the immensely popular feed syndication and tracking service.
• In April 2007 Google acquired DoubleClick, one of AdSense’s biggest competitors, for $3.1 billion in cash.
• In October, 2006 Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars in cash.

You can view a detailed list of Google’s acquisitions on SEO by the Sea.

With the exception of Jaiku and some of the other minor acquisitions listed on SEO by the Sea’s list, most of these acquisitions make sense from the standpoint of Google’s original stated mission as quoted in The Google Story:

To organize the world’s information.

• FeedBurner provides direct access to the updates of most major blogs in real time, making it easy for Google to instantly inject the latest buzz on the blogosphere into its search index.

• YouTube provides direct access to the largest collection of cottage-industry videos on the public domain, thus Google can combine YouTube’s index in order to enhance its video search results.

• The DoubleClick acquisition, while not firmly in line with Google’s stated mission, makes sense from a monetization perspective: acquiring DoubleClick’s network is simply a way to stretch the reach of AdSense.

But what about Google’s more bizarre deals?

When Google started investing millions of dollars into its online office suite (see Zenter), I have to admit, I started scratching my head. I couldn’t help but wonder:

“how in the hell does competing, or attempting to compete, with Microsoft Office help improve the quality of Google’s premiere product, its search results?”

The Jaiku deal had convinced me that something was wrong with Google; was it acting like a dog off a leash because of its newly improved profit margins? Or was someone high when they thought that microblogging was actually worth that much?

It all came crashing down on me when I read about Google Knol, the supposed “Wikipedia killer” under development by Google.

Google Knol is the Forefront of Google’s Strategy

Wikipedia is inherently anti-Capitalist; it’s a socially-driven (socialist) website. Argue it anyway you want it, but you’re not going to find a shred of monetized content anywhere on the site. As per the Wiki Media Foundation’s description, the website operates in a non-profit fashion with no advertisements anywhere on the site. Sounds pretty good, right?

Not if you’re Google.

Wikipedia is a PageRank monster and a traffic giant. I’m going to illustrate the sheer magnitude of WikiPedia’s power and, in the eyes of Google, untapped AdSense potential, that the site has using some statistical measurements:

• WikiPedia has an average PageRank between 8 and 9, the best possible rating being a 10. This means that WikiPedia is one of the highest linked-to sites in the world, and WikiPedia dominates in the search results for any keywords that are well-represented on WikiPedia’s pages. WikiPedia’s PageRank is so strong, in fact, that certain “black hat” SEO optimizers can actually use WikiPedia to bump off an opponent’s page from the top of the search engine rankings.
• WikiPedia is rated as the 12th-most visited site in the world by Quantcast, reaching 43 million Americans a month on average.
• WikiPedia is rated as the 8th-most visted site in the world, according to Amazon’s Alexa Service.

As you can see, WikiPedia is retains a large audience and places very well across a broad range of search erms, and Google Knol is Google’s attempt to get a piece of the pie.

Maybe Google is just trying to pressure WikiPedia into giving in and serving up AdSense content; it’d be awfully hard for Google to lure contributors away from WikiPedia and have them build up Google Knol to the same level of maturity that WikiPedia has reached over the course of its short life thus far.

Google already has a plan for luring contributors, however.

Everything comes back to AdSense with Google. I noticed this gem when I was reading up on Google Knol:

[Google Knol] will allow editors to place Adsense advertisers on their content and Google will share the revenue with them. At first, Google won’t verify the content introduced on Knol and so, as the company announced, everybody is free to publish whatever he/she wants.

Google’s grand strategy has shifted away from trying to become the best in search; it’s already won that battle for the most part. No, Google has moved on from trying to monetize the first click with paid search to trying to monetize the second click with Google AdSense.

Google has moved on from trying to “organize the world’s information;” it’s much more interested in quickly becoming the world’s largest advertising network and owning the most advertising real estate.

Think about it; why else would Google do the following:

• Launch GMail and give out 5 gigs of email space for free (keep in mind that an email client is a site-model that produces a large number of page views for each browsing instance);
• Launch an online office suite, which by design gives users long-exposure to a single set of advertisements;
• Build OpenSocial, a tool which could potentially give AdSense advertisers access to every major social network in the world (except Facebook, for now;)
• Buy YouTube, the world’s largest user-driven video portal;
• Buy out DoubleClick, one of the world’s largest online advertising networks;
• and lastly, build an AdSense-driven Wikipedia clone?

Obviously, it’s to help create more real estate for AdSense.

AdSense is the wave of the future for Google, and if you look down deep enough, you’ll see that all of Google’s latest moves have been to create either high-PageView pieces of AdSense real estate (GMail, Google Documents) or high-breadth real-estate (YouTube, Knol).

So that’s my $0.02. Feel free to ad yours.

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