Consumer: 1, Google: 4556788890

“I guess they made it official today.   Let’s examine what this means:

- Google made $10B in 2006 revenues, 99.9% from search.
- If Google could generate revenues from another revenue stream, it would welcome it.
- Google could not generate meaningful revenues from paid downloads, so it is going completely free.
- By buying YouTube, Doubleclick (not closed yet) and Feedburner, it has already decided what its next billion dollar revenue stream will be: more ads, but in lieu of it all coming from paid search, it will be videos, display/banner/rich media and feeds/emails.

Folks, mark this week as the week where consumers made it official and defeated paid content.  Both the NY Times and Wall Street Journal this week announced or considered making their sites free (or more free).

Part of this, of course, has to do with there not being a viable micropayment system.  But maybe because advertising is shifting so aggressively online is the reason why we don’t have a viable micropayment system, and not the other way around.

This is why all of those projections about the future of paid content are, for lack of better words, full of it.”

Via Hip Mojo Via Ashkan Karbasfroos

So I read this morning over on engadget that Best Buy was offering the XBOX360 HD DVD players for $149.99. Then Brandon my counterpart wrote about it here at The Geekery. Then a saw a counter post by engadget saying that they were wrong. So I hop on over to Best Buy’s site and I see them for $179.99. I was all like WTF govna! So I called my good pals at the local Best Buy and probed them with a good amount of questions. So in the end I am picking up an XBOX360 HD DVD player tonight for $149.99. He said he read $149.99 on the internal site. So I don’t think it was a mistake, I just don’t think they are ready to sell them in the wild yet for $149.99. But the nice gent stamped my name on the thing and took it to the front counter. Plus get this, Toshiba is upping the ante with the HD DVD give-away, the nice chap at Best Buy told me today that whenever you buy a HD DVD player from Best Buy you will receive a form, you fill out this form with your choice of 5 HD DVD movies you would like and Toshiba sends you those movies for free. WOW!

Now I am not sure if this is just the XBOX HD player and if it is just with Best Buy that you receive this offer from Toshiba, I didn’t want to barrage him with anymore questions. Hopefully he was not feeding me lines just to get into the store.

“So tonight we dine in hell!!”, because I am watching 300 in HD tonight!!!

A lot of people know how much I hate Google’s Adword system, but the thing is they make money and they help business’s make money, thus it is good business. I just don’t like the whole process probably because we here at TheGeekery are poor, their are lot of rumors around the net about foul play with Adwords and how Google manipulates the system as well but that is still under investigation. But I simply don’t understand this one….

Google is in the process of acquiring DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, but for some reason the FTC is already investigating them on antitrust violations just for this attempted acquisition. I understand that Google already has the largest market share for ad based e-marketing, but when Yahoo proposed its acquisition of Rights Media was proposed not to long ago it flew through the antitrust regulators stamp of approval process. The same thing happened when Microsoft proposed the acquisition of aQuantive a DoubleClick rival, no one complained no one whined. Why is Google taking so much flack for this, this is capitalism, this is big business.

The answer is in this quote

“Google, which dominates the business of placing text ads alongside search results and on sites across the Web, is expected to capture 27.4 percent of the $21.7 billion in United States online advertising in 2007, according to eMarketer, a research firm. The acquisition of DoubleClick would turn Google into a dominant player in the business of serving banners and other graphical ads that appear on Web sites.”

Yahoo, AT&T and dare I say Microsoft are afraid, very afraid. Google is starting to scare me as well, I just don’t understand how a company can spread the spectrum so wide across so many industry sectors.

Google, even though I do not enjoy some of your business models I do salute you for the massive kahoneys you have.

-TheGeek