John Battelle's Searchblog

AdWords to mobile? Great, just great. They won't even officially confirm the existence of a Google Phone yet (by which even a GooglePhoneOS counts), and already they're serving up ads via mobile.

Yay.

Ah - so *now* people pay attention to the web's inevitable evolution to mobile?

All it takes is a few ads ;-)

The why and how America is in trouble, Mon., Mar. 12, 2007, 10:33 PM
For several months, several of the US homebuilder companies acknowledged an abnormal supply as well as pricing pressures in the marketplace. More recently, the sub-prime mortgage companies that recklessly financed the bulk of the industry’s business discovered a problem with delinquencies and foreclosures. This is the story that will finally push the stock market from Bull to Bear, and the economy into recession.

Traders are nervous, with the upshot being a swing to cash and gold.

Why gold? Under the circumstances that exist today in the financial marketplace, any rise in interest rates will certainly pass the tipping point to where millions of Americans will be forced from their homes and put out on the street. So there is a glass ceiling to any rise in interest rates, but at the same time there is no end in sight to the printing of money. That's a formula for taking down the $USD and pumping up the price of gold.

The whole of the world watched TV images of the inhumane treatment of the poor of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. With great respect to those couple hundred thousand disadvantaged souls (as my readers know I have), I believe those ugly TV images may even look mild compared to the scenario that would follow angry mobs across America if market interest rates rise beyond the tipping point that would collapse the entire US mortgage market.

Yes, I believe there will be a US economic recession, but the elements are now in place for the first time in 80 years for America to sink into a depression.

Should a depression unfold, there will be big name financial houses that will fail. Accordingly, the owners and managers of wealth ought to be researching today how to protect themselves beyond FDIC-insured accounts. I shall write a lot about this in the next month.

Today, there was much talk of the Sub-prime and Alt-A mortgage industry problems. One report I received today came from Credit Suisse whose analysts opined that the problems will get much worse. I agree that this is a situation we must watch closely.

“In the past five years, subprime purchase originations have more than doubled in share to approximately 20% of the total in 2006. Over this time period, subprime lenders eased underwriting standards in an effort to gain market share. Loans were made to first time homebuyers with little or no down payments, as 2006 subprime purchase originations posted an alarming 94% combined loan-to-value, on an average loan price of nearly $200,000. Even more distressing is the fact that roughly 50% of all subprime borrowers in the past two years have provided limited documentation regarding their incomes…

Given the recent credit deterioration in the subprime and Alt-A markets, and the likely fallout throughout the entire housing chain, we are of the opinion that there is a very real threat of “pent-up supply” that will hit the market in the next six-to-twelve months as a result of the lax underwriting standards of recent years.”

The first two sections of the Credit Suisse report focused on providing a backdrop of the mortgage market, and how it has evolved in recent years. The authors discussed the mortgage products that are at greatest risk for increased scrutiny from regulators and highlighted some recent events and potential courses of regulatory action.

They concluded that “while much of the focus in the next few months for the builders will likely be on credit tightening and how that will impact homebuyers’ ability to get financing, we do not want to underestimate the impact that rising foreclosures and delinquencies will have on the supply and pricing dynamics of the housing market.”

But rather than point to specific comments in the Credit Suisse report, I decided to pull a number of exhibits that hopefully will open your eyes to the seriousness of the problem.

In a recent blog, I remarked that this data will come out and, unlike information that is produced by the US Administration, it is the type of data that cannot be easily manipulated.

Google Phone....
they'll record our calls, and sell to a "voyeurs.com" service?
Mr. page... c'mon...

This is probably going to lead to some angry advertisers. Mobile ads had been treated separately; now they're part of an AdWords buy.

The FAQ claims that "only text ads with landing pages that can be suitably adapted for mobile phones will be displayed."

Landing pages may be adaptable, but the intent of the user may not be the same. Someone doing a search for "BMW" on a mobile device is more likely to be looking for repair than to research, price and configure a new car.

Some advertisers may have little or no ability to monetize mobile traffic. In the separate ads model, a search for "hotels" turns up a click-to-call ad for Hotels.com. (Hotels.com understands that it's too complex a transaction to handle on most mobile devices.) If you automatically opt-in all AdWords advertisers for hotels, advertisers could end up paying for clicks that don't drive value.

Google is putting the burden on these advertisers to opt out of the mobile placement.

If I have to wade through ads on my cell phone I am going to go nuts. I know that Google has very unobtrusive ads, that stay off to the sides, but an ad is an ad. Why is Tivo so popular? People can skip the ads. I hope my phone company doesn't go to an ad supported model. The Google borg is big enough.