The other day I was talking to someone who was surprised that Mozilla (innocent, grassroots, stick it to the man with Firefox, Mozilla) make about $2 a user a year from users because they have Google as their preferred search engine.
It's interesting how brands can insulate themselves from the perception that they are in it for the money.
It's also interesting that Google creates these distribution deals (such as the one with Mozilla) by monetizing users through their ad services and sharing that revenue with their partners.
But it has also occurred to me that Google could take this one step further. You see... they continue to release attention grabbing applications in a seemingly random fashion leaving analysts confused as to their 'master plan'.
There have been many interesting articles written on the subject going into some depth about how all the Google beta’s fit together but I think their master plan is much simpler than anyone could imagine. If nothing else - all Google has to do to remain profitable and successful is... 'be cool'.
Google just have to continue to create interesting, buzz generating, high traffic applications that don't necessarily have any sort of sustainability in terms of form or function. They use their ‘cool’ to make the initial announcement (or just sit back waiting for the many Google watchers to discover it) and the initial flurry of attention generates traffic, traffic generates ad impressions and ad impressions generate clicks. Clicks... generate revenue. All the while they keep Microsoft on the back foot trying to guess their next move.
Their next move is to remain cool.
It's interesting how brands can insulate themselves from the perception that they are in it for the money.
It's also interesting that Google creates these distribution deals (such as the one with Mozilla) by monetizing users through their ad services and sharing that revenue with their partners.
But it has also occurred to me that Google could take this one step further. You see... they continue to release attention grabbing applications in a seemingly random fashion leaving analysts confused as to their 'master plan'.
There have been many interesting articles written on the subject going into some depth about how all the Google beta’s fit together but I think their master plan is much simpler than anyone could imagine. If nothing else - all Google has to do to remain profitable and successful is... 'be cool'.
Google just have to continue to create interesting, buzz generating, high traffic applications that don't necessarily have any sort of sustainability in terms of form or function. They use their ‘cool’ to make the initial announcement (or just sit back waiting for the many Google watchers to discover it) and the initial flurry of attention generates traffic, traffic generates ad impressions and ad impressions generate clicks. Clicks... generate revenue. All the while they keep Microsoft on the back foot trying to guess their next move.
Their next move is to remain cool.