15 August 2008
Would you drop Google if they advertised on their homepage?
Google are losing $billions annually because they refuse to place adverts on their front page. That’s according to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. In a recent CNBC interview he was asked about placing ads on the company home page. He said, Google wouldn’t allow it even though it could bring in “some number of billions of dollars.” Schmidt continued, “People wouldn’t like it. We prioritize the end user over the advertiser…”
Would you mind?
So would the end users really abandon Google if they ’sold out’ and put ads on their front page? I’m not so sure. I admit, it would be messy and I certainly wouldn’t like it - but where else would I go? Perhaps to live.com since they don’t have ads but certainly not to Yahoo’s page of ad chaos.
Let me put it another way, do you go to Google just for the nice clean homepage? I’d guess not. In fact, I rarely go to the homepage - I use iGoogle or the quick search bar in my Firefox browser. But since my motivation for using Google isn’t the ad-free homepage, why would I swap when a few ads appeared? If I stopped using Google I’d lose Gmail, Google Reader, Docs, Trends and loads more.
One commenter on CNET said,
I don’t think google are stupid enough to remove the reason people went to google in the first place. All it will do is drive people to use alternatives such as tigoo.com
I think this is a huge overreaction. Other commenters talk about “drastically losing market share” if they place ads on their page - but back to my original question…where else would you go?
Yet another puts Google’s success down to its speed (compared to Live and Yahoo) and this down to the fact that it has no ads. This is a slightly better point that the others but again I’d question whether ads are really going to slow Google down that much. Every other search result page has ads and they pretty quick to me.
So what do you think? Honestly. Can you ever really see yourself dropping Google in favour of Live or Yahoo (or another)?
Whatever you think, I’m pretty certain we’ll never see it happen - unless of course Google’s profit start to dip and the shareholders are crying out for more cash. I recently mentioned here about how protective Google are of their homepage (see Google Blog). Any changes to that page have to be passed by Larry and Sergey - even adding just one word to that page has to be given the OK. Now that’s obsessive.
Photo by Quiplash!
3 Comments currently posted.
Ross says:
Dave Shaw says:
Agreed. I think we’re all used to them now. But is gaining $billions worth it for making a few people a bit upset?
Ed Hardy bags says:
i like this
I use an iGoogle page too and even with the relatively slow 3rd party plugins, the search page loads very quickly.
So no, I don’t think it would actually make any difference to me if Google put ads on their homepage. I’m one of those people who somehow puts up with ads…