Comments on: Google Launches Affiliate Programs

By: observer

observer — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:47:30 +0000

Yup. Grabbing up desktop real estate while the brand continues to have momentum. It’s a long-term play, I’m guessing, designed at broadening the user base and providing less opportunity for Google users to use other search options.

Plus, like it or not, advertising supported software & features are going to become more and more commonplace. I’d bet real money that there’s a behavioral tracking component to the toolbar that will come into play eventually.

By: John Feeney

John Feeney — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 17:00:56 +0000

Welcome too the big boys. The tool bar serves one purpose “BRANDING”. Web-ops is the future like it or not. Affiliate links provide “one” direction for credit. Even in my business, they click-thru my site, bookmark the info, return later. No credit of sale is recorded.

MS & Google are the modern day:

McDonalds and Burger King – let everyone else fight over 3rd place.

Yahoo backed away from AOL (AOL knows its future), Yahoo business model today is buying market-share or they will be left behind.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 03:33:44 +0000

But the Adsense stuff wasn’t the BIG announcement for Wednesday. Breaking news on my website! 😉

By: Jmood

Jmood — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 13:53:54 +0000

The Google Toolbar is valuable for two reasons: first, its continuous presence on the desktop means Google owns a piece of that valuable real estate (~2.7% of my screen as I measure it), and second, its continuous presence means it’s easier to run searches at any time without having to navigate to a new page. Google’s Toolbar has been around long enough that I’d guess their search volume would drop dramatically if it disappeared tomorrow. Not a good thing for their business.

By: Matthew Goeden

Matthew Goeden — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 08:50:57 +0000

dang it. My neat html “strike” tags got cleansed from my comment. The last sentence reads, “The investors lose; the STRIKEjournalistsENDSTRIKE bloggers win.”

By: Matthew Goeden

Matthew Goeden — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 08:49:11 +0000

I agree with all of you comments.

I, too, am a little confused as to the purpose of promoting the Google toolbar. I have a couple theories as to the purpose of the promotion:

(1) This is nothing but an effort to increase Firefox’s market share (the toolbar is just a gimic) to fight Microsoft.

btw — I am not sure how the toolbar gets installed since clicking on the ad briefly sends you to an obscure Google site and then directly on the Firefox’s site. So, what if the person installs Firefox after clicking on your ad, but not the Google toolbar? I will investigate….

(2) Google is just trying to pre-empt Microsoft. Microsoft’s next version of Internet Explorer is probably going to blow most people away; Google is just trying to pre-empt M$’s new features (steal their thunder) (one has to wonder if Google planted the web rumor a couple weeks ago about creating a web-based version of OpenOffice simply to pre-empt Microsoft’s announcement of their web-based products).

I think Microsoft’s annoucement of creating web-based versions of all their apps has Google a little scared. Web-based Outlook is probably used by 90% of the students at Marquette (which blows my mind because I think web-based Outlook sucks big time), which shows how ready people are to embracing web-based fully-featured applications, like Word.

(3) Google doesn’t care about its investors…. 😉 Hippy, open-source evangelists are tainting their business. (hmm, where can I stick somebody about Google fighting Microsoft in this point….)

In brief, the business model is definitely not clear to me. If I were a Google stock holder, I would be complaining. Until the proverbial “next big thing” happens, Microsoft and Google will be taking “pot shots” at each other, which probably will have little-to-no effect on each other. The investors lose; the journalists bloggers win.