Is Google doing advertising evil with new model?

Was there ever a world without “do no evil” Google? Yes, just ten years ago!

Google has become an intrinsic part of the world’s culture and it is only eight years old. Despite its youth, Google has already engendered significant Googley lore: Everyone’s favorite garage band, Google-it!

Perhaps the most (in)famous Google saying: Do no evil!

Google has not only grown much richer in its short time at bat, it has targeted much more than Larry & Sergey’s founding search engine, as Google acknowledges:

Over time we've expanded our view of the range of services we can offer –- web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information -– and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio. This doesn't mean we've changed our core mission; just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more those blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus (to be replaced, of course, by more blurry objects).

What about the core Google “do no evil” operating principle? Google’s “Our Philosophy” still proclaims “You can make money without doing evil” is one of the “Ten things Google has found to be true.”

Google has mastered the “making money” part, but what about the “do no evil” part?

Google on "making money without doing evil":

The revenue the company generates is derived from offering its search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on Google and on other sites across the web. Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link." It is a core value for Google that there be no compromising of the integrity of our results…Our users trust Google's objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

Google may soon be amending its making money without doing evil description. WHY? Google’s “new pricing model,” Pay Per Action (PPA) advertising:

Advertisers to pay only when specific actions that they define are completed by a user on their site. Rather than paying for clicks or impressions, advertisers can choose to pay when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action that they choose.

What about the user experience? Advertising on Google may “always be clearly identified as a "Sponsored Link." But what about the new Google Pay Per Action AdWords served to Google “content partners’ in the AdSense network?

Is Google’s “do no evil” logic getting fuzzy?

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Google co-founders, warned of the potential for advertising evil in their Google prototype developed at Stanford University:

The predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users…we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious…advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results…In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines.

Brin and Page declared their intent to take the “high road,” regarding search engine advertising:

We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

Brin, Page and the Google team apparently are less concerned today about maintaining transparency when they serve AdWords off of Google owned properties, to third-party sites in the Google AdSense network for example.

Last June, Google touted the new “flexibility” of a “Cost Per Action” product to "publishing partners":

We are giving you more flexibility in saying things like "I recommend this product" or "Try JetBlue today" next to the CPA ad unit. However, you should still not incite someone to click on the ad, so saying "Click Here" is not ok.

Now, Google is touting “embedded” referrals:

What is the text link format for pay-per-action ads?

Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher's page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher's recommendatory text: "Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today." (Mousing over the link will display "Ads by Google" to identify these as pay-per-action ads)…just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher.

Google’s new PPA ad format, taking on the characteristics of a publisher’s page touting recommendatory text, is in stark contrast with Google’s existing AdSense prohibitions against “encouraging clicks”:

In order to ensure a good experience for users and advertisers, publishers may not request that users click the ads on their sites or rely on deceptive implementation methods to obtain clicks.

Publishers participating in the AdSense program

May not encourage users to click the Google ads by using phrases such as "click the ads," "support us," "visit these links," or other similar language,

May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks,

May not place misleading images alongside individual ads,

May not place misleading labels above Google ad units - for instance, ads may be labeled "Sponsored Links" but not "Favorite Sites"

NOW, with Google’s new PPA advertising model, Google is encouraging the “encouraging of clicks,” while keeping the “Ads by Google” disclaimer quietly (deceptively?) under users’ mice.

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Video Stream Yourself To The World Non-Stop: Justin.TV

An interesting article from our friends at Masternewmedia. Fair enough there is alot to crunch through here, but if you're interested in a discussion on online TV and finace then a good starting point is about a quarter of the way in...

"...As live Internet TV takes off, this could be an increasingly important mode of advertising - placing sponsored products in the hands of niche-broadcasters certainly feels like an effective way to go..."

Masternewmedia

The video blog has evolved significantly in the last year, propelling a new wave of web celebrities into the limelight - with such names as Amanda Congdon, Ze Frank and Loren Feldman carving out their own niches in the world of web 2.0 video.
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'Attack of the Giant Supercomputer!': Is Google Too Powerful?

Google CEO Schmidt takes issue with the idea that the search behemoth is unfairly dominant. It is a giant supercomputer but it's not The Terminator...is it?

BusinessWeek

Google's accelerating lead in search and its moves into traditional advertising are sparking a backlash among rivals. "I don't see the fear," insists Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "There are an awful lot of partners who are busy making a lot of money by virtue of the strategy we adopted."

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Minority Report

Today Media Guardian publish an Ethnic Power List in an attempt to redress the balance against the initially all white Media Guardian 100.

Though I agree this is an important issue and the act of publishing the ethnic list is an important step toward placing some relatively unrepresented individuals within the public sphere. Isn't the point that we have to have two seperate lists the problem. Shouldn't there just be one integrated list that is chosen by a panel with individuals from both white and other ethnic groups?

Link to the full article below.

Monday April 2, 2007The Guardian

It is six years since Greg Dyke, then BBC director general, made his famous "hideously white" comments about the BBC. Since then, the corporation has made significant strides in getting people from ethnic minority backgrounds on screen. Yet at the BBC, and across the British media, the higher reaches of management are almost universally white. Indeed, it is rare to find a black or Asian face in MediaGuardian's annual list of the most 100 powerful people in the British media.

Ethnic minorities make up only 10% of the UK population so it is perfectly understandable that any power list would be dominated by white people. But statistics do not tell the whole story; the British media industry is concentrated on London, where the population is much more diverse. Yet last year's Media 100 had no black or Asian faces. Were we seriously suggesting that no one from any ethnic minority fulfilled the list's criteria - that they should have some kind of "cultural, economic or political influence" in the British media? Where was Sir Trevor McDonald, Meera Syal, Ash Atalla?
With that in mind, and prompted by a suggestion from Lawrence Lartey of Touch magazine, we decided to convene a panel of media observers and practitioners exclusively from ethnic minorities to see if they could come up with names that the Media 100 panel have missed.
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Digital TV: Recent History & Near Future.

Al Gore may not have actually invented the Internet but he is part of a company whose success is one of many signs heralding a revolution in TV. Not just TV distribution, or TV broadcast or TV features and functionality or TV signal and image quality, but also how TV content is created and produced.

Current TV, a small and premium-only cable TV company, was founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt as a channel that would highlight user created content. Nowadays with the phenomenal success of YouTube, that doesn't seem to be such as stretch, but Current TV was founded over a year ago and was instantly lambasted, first by politicos who saw it as a touchy-feely left-leaning network. Then, when it became clear that the channel was completely apolitical, the financial press took over and dumped on its business model and size and potential for making money.

Having lead the charge it appears Al isn't the only one getting in on the act.

Who's been building digital TV?

Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis (The guys who brough us Skype) have been talking about the idea behind Joost for a long time. In early 2006, they started gathering the world's best engineers, web gurus and media visionaries to start building it, under the code name of The Venice Project. More than a year of very hard work later, their vision is ready for public viewing.

In that time, Joost has grown from a handful of people in a small office outside Amsterdam to more than 100 people spread right across Europe and North America. Joost is already a global venture, bringing TV to a global, highly networked community. And according to Joost they're " already...setting new standards for 21st-century entertainment."

So what are the business models they have in place? Where will the proportion of their revenue come from? And in the long run who will benefit?

I asked Amanda Zweerink, Director of Online Community at Current UK.

"Though I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of our financial arrangements, I can tell you that we do have a fairly substantial advertising model in the US, where we have been on air since August 2005. We even have sponsors who allow our viewers to create their advertising, and then air it on the network (and beyond). As we get settled in the UK & Ireland, we’ll be offering similar programs to sponsors and advertisers here."

It is apparent that Current has had a certain amount of success in the states (Recently industry analyst, Derek Baine, with Kagan Research stated that Current TV was already making a small profit and Hyatt has stated publicly that the company is doing much better than expected financially.) while Joost is still finding it's feet in Europe.

The premise behind Current TV is that users create small video – 3 to 7 minutes – upload them and then visitors to the website vote on what videos should make it on to TV. The significance is that this method takes content creation, production and even editorial decisions and puts them in the hands of viewers. And it clearly is a success. Current TV is available to 30 million cable and satellite subscribers and is large enough now to start attracting real advertising revenue.

At the same time, other TV content companies like YouTube are pioneering the creation of content by users although the delivery mechanism is streaming over the Internet and their isn't a clear revenue model yet. Despite that, YouTube has achieved astonishing growth and huge interest from broadcast networks.

But there is also a huge revolution going on in delivery and distribution and in features and functionality. It is already clear that whatever TV and video distribution method wins out, it will involve distribution of IP-based information and traffic. Whether that is streamed, on-demand, over a closed circuit (also called 'walled garden'), wireless, via fiber optic or whatever, it will be packetized.

At every stage, the TV and video industries are undergoing huge transformation. Cable, satellite, telcos, cellular and even media companies are all joining battle to establish the standard delivery platforms. Cable, TV, media, internet and even telco companies are joining battle to establish standard distribution models. If anything, right now there is divergence in these areas rather than convergence.

Consumers and industry participants can expect to see a gradual move toward standardization of the delivery platform and even to some extent the distribution model. But don't expect to see the content and editorial sides of the equation settle down any time soon – rather, Current TV is the simplest and most obvious of the solutions that will be coming to our screens.


More to follow…

Coming up shortly: Revenue Models for Digital TV & Who Benefits?

Nice!

More on democratic media: Internews

Law and Policy

Internews has worked for the adoption and implementation of fair media laws in 21 countries making the transition from a formerly totalitarian or autocratic state towards a more democratic society.

Participants in a Internews media law workshop in Timor-Leste debate the importance of the inclusion of community radio journalists in the press law. Photo: Internews Timor Leste

A country's legal infrastructure is a key factor in media's ability to fulfill their "watchdog" function. However, most of the emerging democracies since the early 1990s have completely lacked a legal base that would allow non-governmental media to defend their newfound abilities to present alternative and often critical points of view.

In addition to working for fair media laws, Internews has also helped create 112 national media associations, which advocate for just and open media laws, defend the civil rights of journalists, and promote industry reform.

In post-war Afghanistan, Internews has advised the government and media organizations on setting media policy in which independent media can thrive and journalists can report without fear of government reprisals.

With the involvement of the Journalists' Association of East Timor (TLJA), Internews played an integral role in lobbying the Constituent Assembly to enshrine media freedoms and freedom of speech into the new constitution of East Timor (Timor-Leste).

Internews Network’s U-Media Project in Ukraine founded the Kyiv Media Law Institute to support the development of media law and strengthen democratic standards of freedom of speech and access to information in Ukraine through legislative work, research and education.

Internews Pakistan's media law team is comprised of Pakistan's foremost media law specialists, knowledgeable in such areas as policy formulation and advocacy, broadcast and cable television licensing and regulatory schemes, and broadcasters' and journalists' defense issues. They work with the private broadcast sector, legislators and regulatory authorities to enable an improved media law environment for Pakistan's growing private media sector.

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Current TV

The TV channel without programmes
By Kevin Young Entertainment reporter, BBC News
A TV channel co-founded by former US Vice-President Al Gore, which relies heavily on its audience to supply its content, has launched in the UK.
But Current TV - running in the US since 2005 - will not broadcast programming in the traditional sense, showcasing instead short films created by the public.
So what will viewers actually see when they tune in?
Imagine you asked a dozen strangers to make a short video describing an unusual aspect of their life, an interest of theirs or a person they considered noteworthy.
Then imagine you watched all 12 films in a row, knowing neither what was coming next nor if it would capture your attention.
This is roughly how it feels to watch an hour of Current TV.
There are several telltale signs that the channel is aimed at impatient young people, or "a media-grazing audience", as one of its executives puts it.
'Shuffled'
Firstly, each "pod" - there are no programmes in the traditional sense - lasts an average of three to eight minutes.
A bar on the screen shows how long has elapsed since that "pod" began, and when the next one is coming along.
And the scheduling is entirely random - or "shuffled", to use the broadcaster's own word - so you never know what to expect.
So far, so iPod - although the management was very careful to avoid references to Apple's iconic portable media player at a news conference to launch the channel.
This random nature means that a satirical animation parodying news events is scheduled beside footage of a "guerilla gardener" who plants flowers at the dead of night to enliven run-down parts of London.
And a hard-hitting interview with a Kenyan prostitute, struggling to feed her children, is followed by "a day in the life" of The Edge, specially filmed by the guitarist's U2 bandmate Bono.
Chart
The main structure to the schedule comes from a mini-chart show every half an hour, which counts down the most popular terms from online search engine Google.
These can revolve around serious topics - the most-read stories on Google News that day, for instance - but at other times, they are more light-hearted, focusing on a particular term linked to topical events.
Some 'pods' might only have a life of an airing or two on the network, and some will air dozens of times over a lengthy period of time. It just depends how popular they are David Newman, President of Programming, Current TV
If Current TV had been running when Forest Whitaker won his Oscar for acting, you imagine it would have dedicated one of the segments to Google's most popular forests.
"And at number three, it's Nottingham Forest..." - you get the idea.
The other thing which viewers should notice about Current TV is how modern it is - or rather, how current, according to its strong, on-screen branding.
The network's name is wrapped around every possible slot, so the Google link-up is known as Google Current and films about serious, topical issues appear under the News Current banner.
People with strong views can be heard on Current Rant, while those describing their unusual interests or activities come under the term Current Maverick. Currently, anyway.
'Fresh material'
Mr Gore, who was heavily involved in the creation of the channel, believes his programming team will not struggle to fill airtime.
"I don't think you'll have the experience of thinking, 'that's repeating too often', because they're going to be tuned in to that.
"Traditionally cable and satellite programming has had a higher repeat rate but there's so much fresh new material," he told the BBC News website.
And the schedulers can quickly arrange the output "according to what they think the British public wants to see", adds David Newman, the channel's president of programming.
"Some 'pods' might only have a life of an airing or two on the network, and some will air dozens of times over a lengthy period of time. It just depends how popular they are."
The opening flurry of material on offer looks promising.
Now the channel must wait to see if this "democratisation" of television proves a hit with UK audiences.
And viewers will be hoping for a consistency in the quality of material offered - ironic, perhaps, for a channel so reliant on unpredictability.
Current TV is available in the UK on Sky Digital channel 229 and Virgin Media channel 155.