online advertising, image search, clips, google, marissa mayer, search

Google misses $200 million a year on image search

Google doesn't serve advertisements against image searches, as it does with normal search results. This costs the company as much as $200 million in annual revenue, Google VP Marissa Mayer told KQED's Michael Krasny in this clip. So why does Google hold back? Mayer says the search engine is looking out for the user: "Our metrics show us that people would actually start using image search less. Not a lot less, but about 1 percent less. We actually value the user so much that we said no." Cute. But what about the shareholders? The plummeting dollar won't save Google every quarter.

4:20 PM on Thu Apr 24 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
1,531 views
6 comments

Comments

Bornean at 04:38 PM on 04/24/08
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I'm telling you, this is enjoying the indulgence of the Bubble. They should be using this time to swallow every quarter they can. Hell, literally, they need to have vending machines to perform a google search, instead of making it free. I don't care, all I know is my google shares dropped $200 dollars and these pricks are caring about "users".

"Users"? "People"? This is business, not about my little pony. I don't even want to recognize you as a human. Simply a potential source of revenue. Just gotta crack that egg shell to get them to hand the money over.

Kids and college peeps are too young to crack open. Eggonomics.
TheTypeset at 06:25 PM on 04/24/08
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Would image searches really convert though? I don't think people would really find benefit from those ads, unless stock photo companies advertised.
nethaqr at 06:52 PM on 04/24/08
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Is it just me, or does anyone else find GooGirl's voice and speech pattern highly irritating in this clip?
felswick at 08:28 PM on 04/24/08
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Nice spin Marissa, but isn't it really because you know that the image owners would demand a portion of the search revenue generated by ads served around their content? There's no abstract of an image - you see the image right on the Google site, and any ads that Google puts on those results could be construed as trying to make money on the back of someone else's IP. This is the exact same reason they don't have ads in Google Video search results. Making money off of ads next to abstracts of people's content is one thing - making money off of ads directly attached to their content is a whole different deal.
raincoaster at 10:23 PM on 04/24/08
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Isn't it really, really because people who use image search have difficulty reading?
Magister at 12:46 AM on 04/25/08
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@TheTypeset: Your rhetorical about whether the ads would covert could be a valid argument against her $200m figure, but I'm not sure that it's a reason for them not to be offered.

I mean, we've all seen those (stupid) "Top 10" lists, where if you choose to view it, you've got to click through ten or more screens to see all of "The Best Places to Live" or "The Smoggiest Cities". Each and every screen inevitably has a box of context ads, but I'm willing to bet that practically no one clicks on any of the those in the middle, but they're still there.