John Battelle's Searchblog

Here's a quote:

>> You can draw a variety of conclusions from this mess. One, as some analysts have in fact pointed out, you need to be careful how you use the ComScore data, as has now been made obvious. Two, both the Street and the press - me included - did not do a very good job of explaining exactly what ComScore was measuring. Three, ComScore never did a very good job explaining to people what it was measuring; it tried to explain the slowdown, and still never fully explained its approach. And four, Google’s refusal to provide any earnings guidance leaves the Street constantly trying to fill the vacuum with whatever third party data might become available. Plenty of blame to go around.

source: http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2008/04/17/comscore-shares-whacked-the-paid-click-controversy

(note also the lively discussion going on there ;P)

John, just to keep you humble...you were right on Ggl earnings...tho the stock is being, let's say, more well-received than you thought it might.

Anyway, seems the "economy" is only good news for Ggl. We have clients who are only now embracing marketing to reach new customers as they may be seeing/sensing a falloff in spending from their traditional customers...esp if B2C.

A few have even said..."get online, just in case it gets worse out there"

Whereas this slow economy is bad for restaurants and premium gas, it may be a windfall for online ad brands. Merchants (and us agencies) will have to measure uptick and efficacy, etc....but Ggl will be counting piles of cash.

Jeff, I think you are perhaps confusing Google with "online advertising" -- and indeed I also believe that many marketers dealing in online marketing / advertising may very well make the same mistake.

If you take a close look at the comscore response on their blog ( http://www.comscore.com/blog/2008/04/reconciling_comscores_and_goog.html ), you will note that they summarize the apparent discrepancy between what comscore was reporting and what Google reported Thursday thusly:

>> 1) U.S. paid clicks have indeed softened, 2) that the softening is not due to the economy, and 3) Google’s overall revenue performance was driven by strong international growth and CPC increases.

In plain English, that means that the US growth has virtually STOPPED -- and that Google's income is increasingly coming from abroad (see also http://twitter.com/nmw/statuses/792484300 and/or http://twitter.com/nmw/statuses/792483212 ).

Note also that it may very well be that advertisers in the United States are finally beginning to figure out that they can advertise their products elsewhere than simply with Google alone. Indeed, John raises this issue in his recent openforum.com blog post -- see:

http://blogs.openforum.com/2008/04/18/linking-search-conversation-and-your-site/