15 Nov 2009

An excellent Goal

 for an individual would be to transform his name into a qualifying adjective from a proper noun. For example : If Dave happens to deliver an outstanding presentation, I'd refer to him as Steve Jobs. He may not compare with Steve Jobs per se', but my implication is towards the notable presentation skills.

Similarly, a very pertinent goal for a product company would be to position its product in such a manner that its identity transforms into a verb from a noun. For instance, today, we do not search for 'stuff' on Google, we plainly Google 'stuff'.

Needless to say, I am quite enamored by Google. Check the tags herein and thou shalt realize.

 

14 Nov 2009

Much more than Doodles.

First the Winner 

 

My India- full of life -  Puru Pratap Singh (4th std)

 

The above is just a brilliant representation of India. No wonder this entry bagged the first place. Specially the e- where Puru says Mahatma Gandhi wanted to educate everyone , that just steals the cake. 

But there were a number of other entries which evinced my interest and am sure they will yours too. I wonder if its just me , but I noticed that as the age of the entrants increases the creativity in their entries goes on dwindling while their aesthetics increase.

Somehow, everything that I post these days seems to be linking in some way to Seth Godin's articles (Trust me, I am not making this up). He had written very recently how the focus of companies changes as they progress from being startups to large enterprises. Focus of startups - How to deliver best products to clients while focus of enterprises - How not to get things wrong. I'd let your mind work out the analogy with my point above.

Without further ado, here are the rest of the entries. I was not half as creative as these kids then. So you can imagine the situation now (considering my inference above is correct) 

Unity in diversity- Different Religions in India 

 

Colours of India - Different festivals in India (Sriradha Kapoor -2nd std)

 

Land of colourful festivals - Festivals (Tanushree Tripathi - 3rd std)

 

Ghungroo se Google - Dance (Arushi - 5th Std)

 

 

Our Festivals - Aman Malhotra (5th Std)

 

 

Land of Gandhi - Vedanshi Dalmia (6th Std)

 

 

 

Golden Soil of my IndiaSwati Aggarwal (8th std)

 

 

 


Cheers.

14 Nov 2009

Paid News

is unacceptable as a concept. Anymore.

Its taken me a while to pen this after Murdoch came out against content aggregators. I am posting a thirty seven minute interview of the media baron with David Sheer on Sky news here.

Murdoch obviously seems to be caught in his decade old dogmas. As Michael Woolf described a few days ago on Newser, the technologically impaired Murdoch is not a big fan of the development of the web and Google in particular. But we don't want to get personal here. 

I firmly believe you cant put a money value to information in today's age. The other day i was discussing with an acquaintance as to why journalists do not detail out the factors of correlation between the Crude oil prices and the weakening of the dollar, he , very correctly pointed it out that the journalists are plainly giving us news. If we wish to delve deeper into the micro and macro economic factors going on in the background to build this inference, we should lay our hands on the relevant research papers - essentially premium content even today. 

When can Rupert's proposal (money attached to news ingestion) work?

  • When all Original Content Providers join together to form a cartel supporting his proposition.
  • In case of a cartel not being formed, NewsCorp should provide content of an excellent and unique nature.
  • Content ingested from the WSJ website by a premium member cannot be shared anywhere else (on his/her personal blog etc)
  • Advertisers are willing to pay WSJ on a model differing from a PPC/Clickthrough model
  • Benefits of being a premium member far exceed just getting access to content. 
Why won't Rupert's proposal work?
  • I focus on my third point above. Imagine a situation wherein I am a premium member of WSJ. I get access to premium content and I lift this content and shift it to my blog. 
  • Effectively I am paying to the tune of $1000 a year. If I stand to establish credibility, then I stand to get a lot of ad-revenue onto my own blog with which I can easily pay-off my premium membership fees. 
  • If Newscorp is saying, it will patrol the web for such aberrations, then they are effectively saying they will incur pointless operating costs which will eat into their revenue (flowing through the premium memberships). And if they tend to increase their premium-membership fees to meet this OPEX, they are effectively sending a model based on Economies of Scale for a toss. 
What I assume will happen if Rupert's proposal is implemented?
Murdoch has basically spoken about putting pay-walls around his news content. While he does explicitly refer to Google, the statistics show that it effectively boils down to that.

Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search have already tied up. Wolfram Alpha (the computational engine) is tying its search results to Bing. Effectively, we might encounter a time when NewsCorp ties up with one of these search engines. Imagine a situation where Bing+Yahoo project news from newscorp as 'We have something that Google does not'. Hell, do we care?

Good luck to Bloomberg and WSJ if they are going to make their entire content base premium. Events like these just make me feel that we are going backward in time. 

I just shudder to imagine my feed-demon asking me for my credit card details before fetching feeds from these sites.

A big thumbs down to paid news. 

Cheers. 

 

11 Nov 2009

The Bharat Matrimony-Google Case

Recently, Chennai-based Consim India Pvt Ltd, which owns bharatmatrimony.com and indiaproperties.com, sued Google for infringement of its trademark.The Argument:The company has said Google ads are used in BharatMatrimony’s platform to sell space to its (BharatMatrimony’s) competitors. Consim said that it had “trademarked www.tamilmatrimony.com, www.telegumatrimony, www.bharatrimony.com, www.bengalimatrimony.com, www.muslimmatrimony.com. Hence, Google should not allow ads on those trademarks”. If a user types ‘Tamil matrimony’, for instance, in the Google search field on the site, the resultant advertisements or websites shown include shaadi.com and simplymarry.com. Consim says this shows Google is allowing its competition to bid on the trademarks of BharatMatrimony.


My Counter Argument/Query:

Let me start by giving an overview of how Google Search Advertising (common name Adwords powered advertising) really works.

Google Adwords standard edition allows a user/business to create an adwords account through which it can manage multiple ad-groups and ad-campaigns. Usually, an ad-campaign initiated by a consumer/business can be classified under two broad categories.

1. Keyword targeted advertising (Ads across the Google Network)

2. Site targeted advertising. (Ads in specific sites)

What is the difference between the two? Well, the differences arise in the pricing models employed. Keyword targeted advertising uses the CPC (Cost per click model) whereas the site based targeted advertising uses the CPM (Cost per thousand page impressions) model; The M in the CPM is derived from Roman Numerals where M denotes 1000.

As a part of this case, I shall focus on keyword based advertising unless i explicitly state otherwise. Now, a major concept in keyword based advertising is Maximum CPC (The maximum amount that a business/consumer is willing to pay for a particular keyword each time a user clicks it on the google network).

How is this information relevant to our case at hand? Well, heres how.

Google employs an auction of the maximum CPC prices that the different businesses/consumers have bid in order to assign the keywords to them. How does Google decide the minimum amount of clearance of the auction? Heres how.


Basically a two pronged approach is used. Google looks at
1. Cost
2. Quality


while determining the minimum CPC of a keyword. The minimum CPC is the clearance amount (i.e.) A business /consumer has to atleast bid more than the minimum CPC to be eligible in the auction process. Not only is cost (one of the above criteria), a numeric and therefore an objective parameter, even quality turns out to be quite an objective parameter. Heres how Google determines quality score of the keyword.

A keyword’s click-through rate (CTR). This is the number of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of impressions.

• Ad text relevance (such as if the ad text contains a keyword).
• Overall historical keyword performance with Google (i.e. how the keyword has performed in the past).
• User experience on the landing page or site associated with an ad.

Using these two parameters (Quality and Cost), Google assigns a minimum CPC amount for each keyword. Consider a scenario where google assigns a $3 per day minimum CPC for the keyword - Op9s.Just suppose that I as an owner put forth a bid of $7 (people who know me will be scoffing and laughing at this statement) ..... anyway... Yea, I bid $7 and say, theres this competitor of mine who comes in and bids at $9. He/It gets the keyword straightaway. How? Well.. He/It cleared the cost barrier by bidding a couple of dollars more than me and he also cleared the quality barrier. How?

Check the parameters Google uses to determine the quality score. A competitor having exactly the same line of business as you is bound to be operating on the same keywords. So relevance, CTR, Uexp is all bound to be the same for him/it too. So, then obviously when you (a reader/op9 member/subscriber) search for Op9s.com on google, you are bound to see my competitor's ad in the right hand column.

I have yammed enough to make you realize what I am getting to. My moot point here is Does Bharat Matrimony have a strong case? I am not sure how the issue of Trademarks creates a difference in this case. Isnt Google Adwords/Keywords independent of this aspect.

Let me give you an example from the Google barn itself. Have you ever searched for google Analtyics on google search? Try it.  

Look closely at the right hand column. Yes! The ad belongs to Webtrends Analytics - a direct competitor of Google Analytics. And an interesting piece of information here is that GA is also trademarked ;however it is from the Google stable and thus upto Google's dicretion as to how it wants to structure its search engine presence.

In light of the above fact, let me take an idealistic viewpoint : I do not see why Bharat Matrimony is so insecure about its competitors' ads showing alongside its search results. If a person searches for Bharat matrimony, in all likelihood, he shall go into Bharat Matrimony. If he wanted to go into any matrimonial site on the web, he would have put 'Matrimonial Sites' or 'Matrimony' as the search keyword.

Pour in your views on this. I'd like to guage if I am missing out something fundamentally important here.

Cheers.

 

Nikhil Sharma's Posterous

Me : Nikhil Balakrishnan Sharma.

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