Previous discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14221587" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14221587</a><p>Author's comment: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223780" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223780</a><p>"Honestly I just wrote this for fun to play devil's advocate and see how convincing an argument I could make. It was intended to be more creative writing than a serious market prediction. (The title used to be "How Google Collapsed" -- Startup Grind changed it and added the subtitle when they published it on their blog).<p>I don't think it's likely that Google is going to collapse any time soon. I just wanted to imagine a world where they had, and try to work backwards from there with current data.<p>It's my first article, and I'm only 21 so I definitely got a lot of things wrong and oversimplified/combined others. But I do have almost 2 years of work experience in online advertising, so I have /some/ idea of how things work.<p>I was honestly expecting 12 views and a mean comment about how stupid I was -- I didn't expect the article to pick up traction. The editor in chief of Startup Grind reached out to me and asked if I would like to have it published on their blog, and I said sure."
This article is placing so much emphasis on voice interfaces as the replacement for screens, but I can't imagine that happening for more than a handful of use cases. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I would never use a voice assistant in public, and you can show a much higher depth of information on a screen. Screens are going to be around for a long time, with AR headsets being the logical next step.<p>Google will have plenty of time to show me ads on screens in the future (if not directly in search, then via app stores and video ads). And even if their voice assistant just exists to direct me to their screen presence more, in my experience, google as a voice assistant has been 10x more reliable than either Alexa or Siri.
I'm tempted to be pithy. I'm tempted to write something like "and that, of course, is why Microsoft as a company completely folded after the death of the desktop PC," but it wouldn't really be worth reading. On the other hand who doesn't like a bit of apophasis, right?<p>But, you know, maybe they're right. Maybe online advertising is a dying business, and maybe that's why no one solicits for advertising partnerships at the bottom of their articles.<p>Who knows. Maybe their article is, seriously this time, completely correct, and maybe that flashy graph they've got at the top of the page -- you know, the one asking about whether or not you search for products on Amazon or Google -- isn't because no one really feels the need to google for toilet paper before buying some off whoever is convenient.<p>You know what will help? Some pullquotes from CEOs saying things like "brand owners are detemined to take the lead". Of course they are. That's why the Internet is now devoid of atrocious ads.<p>Quick. Put some more graphs in, but make sure you don't put the one in that shows their rising profit margins.
I hope it collapses fast and hard. Advertising is a nearly worthless vampire industry that works to suck some of the life out of other useful services. If Cisco, Qualcomm, or Texas Instruments threw in the towel, their respective industries would change forever; we would be hearing about it in a matter of minutes. The same can't be said for any advertising company other than Google, and that's not because we find Google's advertising particularly endearing. As time wears on and consumer patience for advertising wears thin, Google will need a miracle in a market that the world can't live without.
This assume Google can't do anything about it. But it can.<p>It can deny the use of it's services to people using ad-blockers.<p>It's possible that we see a migration from youtube. Maybe some people will be ok with migrating from gmail (probably not the majority though. I did it and it was HARD). But very few people will stop using the search engine or google map, because it has absolutely zero decent competitor. I tried them all for months, fairly. Their are not even on the same planet.<p>So apart from a few geeks, people will just disable the ad blocking software if google decide to force their hand.<p>Besides, wait for the W3C DRM standard + webassembly to be used to hack very hard to block ads...
The battle for the future success of Google isn't going to be over advertising. Google already knows they need to be more diverse than that. And they already are, even if we look no farther than their cloud platforms.<p>When the article said that Search is the only product that Google was a winner on, it seems to have forgotten about gmail. And how a large number of enterprise customers are moving their internal email to gmail, and thereby their Office Suite to Docs. If Google fills in the gaps that custom software development fills in the enterprise (small department level workflow apps, content management, industry-specific forms, processes, and data flows, etc)... THAT is what will make a whole new Google over the next 10 years.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I think the value of personal data in advertising is inflated right now.<p>P&G spent $7 billion on online ads in 2016, and has been making a lot of noise about moving away from them. Many of those consumer products can be sold to almost anyone, and hyper-targeting users by keyword may not help much.<p>For the sake of the Internet, it'd be stellar if the value of personal data corrected to a level that stopped the war on user privacy. If it turns out that the value is propped up by hype/FOMO-driven ad purchases by larger companies, it could very well happen.
Using voice interfaces (at least in a public setting) is going to end up like the Segway. Looks kinda cool on the brochure, but feels a bit daft actually doing it when out and about.
This graph paints a different picture, though:
<a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/234529/comparison-of-apple-and-google-revenues/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/234529/comparison-of-app...</a>
Clever article, blending history and future conjecture. Sure, Google has potential long term problems with its ad revenue stream but the have sufficient cash reserves to succeed in different lines of business. And they probably will. I use fastmail and mostly duck duck go, so in a sense Google doesn't make money from me in the traditional advertising sense, but I like GCP, pay for YouTube red and music, and buy movies and tv shows on Play TV.
Two of the largest customers of adwords are Expedia and Priceline. Why?<p>Because almost every travel customer starts by typing their destination into google, and whoever has the top ad gets the booking.<p>It's a fierce bidding war on keywords, and the only winner is Google.<p>This article grossly understates the number of companies and industries that begrudgingly play this game to acquire expensive traffic with hopes that it converts to cheap organic repeat traffic in the future.<p>Google is doing fine.
So, talking about ads... Yes my adblocker on the web is pretty nice... But I'm still getting bombarded by ads on Youtube and Twitch.<p>That's the difference, if you own the platform / app, you get 100% ad views.<p>By putting more DRM on the web and 'sneaking' ads on the web, they will prevail.
My feeling is that the thing that would really rock Google to its core would be a major scandal about ad spend.<p>Like one where they were unambiguously exposed - say - channelling all the good leads to people at the start of campaigns and then once the spend was established starting to feed them the shit leads, until they convinced them to spend more money. In short like a Casino that would let people win to give them a taste and then reef them.<p>But of course that's purely speculative and probably that type of thing couldn't be unambiguously proved even if it were true - which it isn't.
Google needs to fix the issue with search optimization gaming. Searching for products on Google is useless! The SEO manipulation puts marketing heaving companies first, while companies with product focus rather than marketing focus loose out. This creates a world of empty products with the majority of the product's investment going towards the advertising of the empty thing.
If I had to pick a point of fragility for Google it is that the founders have set up the company such that they exercise dictatorial control. This can be good, but it's a question mark what will happen once that control is passed to other hands. Further, Google makes most of its money from advertising and it's search engine. They're one competitor away from being in serious trouble. So far Google has beaten them all off but there are a lot of very smart people out there who want to cut into that very profitable business. In the plus column for longevity is a very large cash hoard. However, history proves that companies can vaporise their cash overnight in ill-advised acquisitions.
It is true that, for all the cool stuff Google does, it is still fundamentally an advertising company where the future in those revenue streams looks bleak.<p>That said, Microsoft didn't die off in the "post PC" era even after spectacular failures in things like trying to make inroads in mobile phones. So with Google yes there are dark clouds on the horizon, but they could pull off a change in revenue streams and still do quite well.<p>The clock is ticking though... they're spending tons on these other pet projects that have yet to pay off so the pressure is really on to prove that they can actually create a viable business with revenue outside advertising.
You want evil? I can give you evil.<p>ASM.js or similar like Webassembly. Use it, create a polymorphic VM in the browser that forces a user to compute the ads in order to get content.<p>Now, trap the content in each VM (and no, not as a downloaded plaintext). This will be an encoded bytestream, that the easiest way to decode will be through the browser VM, and displaying ads along the way.<p>That's evil, and I would highly assume it works.
This reminds me of all those articles saying Facebook would die because people were moving to mobile and "there are no ads in the Facebook app".
I'm not too sure about the conclusion of the article. While it's true that ad blockers have been adopted by users, advertising revenue from Google is about to get a 15% growth this year compared to last year.<p>Regarding Cloud computing, although I have no numbers to back this up, I'm pretty sure Google Cloud will also grow nicely in the next decade.<p>From an AI perspective, they're clearly leading that field over amazon, without a doubt.