Google

Oct 29, 2023 ∞

I’ve said about Meta:

There really isn’t a company better at monetizing via ads.

Some might be yelling “but what about Google?!”

Big G is good at protecting their position to lock in default behavior and monetizing that way.

testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.

The end of Meta is regularly proclaimed, but Google is in a more precarious position.

Oct 26, 2023 ∞

We might have reached peak vertical video:

Have consumers started to cool towards short-form video? That’s certainly one read from Google and Snap results.

If anything this serves as a good reminder to not go all in on one content format based on the platforms’ push du jour (just ask news publishers about social video). Different businesses do different forms of content better than others and different forms work better for different purposes.

Don’t give up on vertical video. But don’t go all in on it either.

Oct 20, 2023 ∞

Everything old is new again, which is why Media Mix Modeling is the new attribution.

measurement has been so hampered by recently enacted privacy restrictions that Meta, Google and Amazon are finding that any measurement tool is better than not demonstrating attribution at all.

Oct 18, 2023 ∞

Google is further signaling the decay of attribution modeling with the announcement:

First click, linear, time decay and position-based attribution models are going away

None of these were great. Data-driven replaced position-based and GA4’s shift to user (and event)-based measurement over session-based made first click redundant.

But I think this is an admission from Big G that (aside from last click) accurate attribution is hard to do in a post-cookie world, so it’s all about data modeling now.

Oct 12, 2023 ∞

ChatGPT can query the web again. Which means it’s crawling the web. Which means it’s indexing the web. Which means it’s a search engine.

Search 1.0 was hand built directories (Yahoo!)

Search 2.0 was algorithms (Google’s PageRank)

Search 3.0 will be information engines 🔮

Provide the answers without the user clicking all over. Worse for websites, better for users?