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December 08, 2005

It's the biggest threat to its business model

A interesting conversation with David Vise current author of The Google Story.

David Gardner: We've talked a lot about Google's strengths. What is one thing that Google doesn't do well, in your mind?

David Vise: I think one of the things that Google struggles with is a lack of sensitivity, I would call it, to its weaknesses and an unwillingness to acknowledge that it has weaknesses. The biggest single Achilles' heel in Google's entire system is something called click fraud. Click fraud involves people clicking away on ads on Google, which puts money in Google's coffers and costs advertisers money. But if somebody is clicking away on that and they don't have any intention of buying a product or researching a product, they may be doing it just to harm the competition. Or if they're a website owner or publisher and they're carrying Google ads, they may be clicking on it because they get eighty cents of every dollar and Google gets twenty cents.

So Google approaches this problem from almost a completely technological and engineering vantage point in trying to solve it. It's the biggest threat to its business model.

Currently, Google's ads perform so well that marketers build in the cost of click fraud and just have an understanding that this is going to be an ongoing problem, but they all complain when I talk to them that Google doesn't do enough and Google doesn't do as much as it claims to do in fighting click fraud.

Posted by dj at December 8, 2005 06:33 PM