Travis Johnson

Is There an Online Financial Services Ad Slowdown?

Excellent analysis, thanks. As someone who hosts primarily financial services ads on my sites (though almost never mortgage-related ads), I can say that though the overall trend is still for fairly steady growth, the rates and performance of ads on my site did spike in July of this year before dipping and returning to a steadier growth trend.

Google Continues to Gain Search Traffic Share

Incredible -- and the strategy of advertising heavily offline (especially TV) to drive new searchers to your site, as is being tried by Microsoft and Ask (and Yahoo in the past, though I don't know that they do it now), continues to seem like an expensive exercise in self-aggrandizement. I can't believe how many Ask.com ads I see on TV now, I'm very curious to see if that helps them at all to take share -- or at least keep up with the growth in the market -- in the months ahead. To think, Google built this dominance without spending a dime to advertise (OK, that's an exaggeration, but a small one).

Message to Tight-Fisted Google: Spend or Stagnate

Math mistake: I typed too quickly and put in Google's total current assets as their cash hoard. In truth, their cash and short term securities holdings are $10 billion, not $14 billion. Sorry for the exagerration, and thanks to the reader who pointed out my error (and to the many who flamed me for irresponsibly urging Google to blow money acquiring whatever they can find, which I hope is now how my comments read).

Cheers,
Travis

Message to Tight-Fisted Google: Spend or Stagnate

Math mistake: I typed too quickly and put in Google's total curent assets as their cash hoard. In truth, their cash and short term securities holdings are $10 billion, not $14 billion. Sorry for the exagerration, and thanks to the reader who pointed out my error (and to the many who flamed me for irresponsibly urging Google to blow money acquiring whatever they can find, which I hope is now how my comments read).

Cheers,
Travis

Google Needs to Shed Some Cash

I posted something quite similar a couple days ago -- Since they can't spend money on people and servers as fast as it's coming in, what else can they do? Dividends or buybacks seem irresponsible (or at least an admission of failure) in light of their secondary offering last year, unless of course they really did have no strategic plan for using that money :)

I don't like to see my companies doing acquisitions just because they have too much cash, but they need to invest it in something soon, whether it's an internal initiative or an acquisition, or they lose the opportunity to strengthen their position at a time when their major competitors remain stuck in the mud.

Cheers,
Travis

Stay Tuned for an Akamai-Google Clash

Interesting analysis -- I'm an Akamai shareholder (and a Google shareholder) as well, and I haven't ever built my assumptions about Akamai's growth around their ability to sell advertising on top of their served data. It might be an interesting business for them, but I think their core businesses should do well as more and more commercial high bandwidth data moves online, with or without advertising. Those providers who are selling audio or video content (a la itunes or movie downloading) are relying on the best service, not on help in advertising, and likewise I don't think those who sell software online are going to rely on advertising or on Google's automated service. As long as there is a large market for purchased online downloads (as opposed to ad-subsidized), it would be hard to beat the reliability and speed of the Akamai network. I sometimes think about selilng a small portion of my Akamai because it has come so far so fast, but not because I"m worried about their lack of an advertising product.

Google Launches ValueClick Killer

Very interesting -- I haven't been offered that as a publisher yet, but I have used CJ on occasion and I wouldn't be surprised to see Google destroy them. The VCLK put options don't have huge premiums, either, so they may be worth a try for the short-averse. Thanks for the update, I saw that here before I noticed any of the SE watchers had blogged about it, and as far as I can tell it hasn't hit the "real" news yet.