July 14, 2006 | Friday

Google joins the conversation?

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Search Engines |Google |Search Expertise |Click Fraud

Let’s imagine for purposes of argument that click fraud were not policed by Google, and it were rampant. Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So over some amount of time, the system is in fact self correcting. In fact, that there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen. But because it is a bad thing, and because we don’t like it and because it does, at least for the short term, create some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try and detect it and eliminate it.

That’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt really said about click fraud back in March, and what was yanked out of context by some people only recently. John Battelle says of the Google blog post responding to the furore:

It feels....like Google being part of a conversation. I wish it came a bit quicker, but it’s worth a read.

It is often said - most prominently by Fortune magazine last year - that Google is so bad at the ‘new PR’ of blogs and social media that they have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and made monolithic Microsoft into the underdog with the online press. Google’s reaction to this latest situation indicates that maybe, just maybe, they are starting to wise up to the ‘less is more’ rule of online spin.