Filed under: Industry, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising
A week ago, I had a bad day. I just missed a train, got off at the wrong stop, turned the wrong way out of the station, got caught in a turnstile … You get the picture.
By noon, I realized that this was a bad day and that everything that could go wrong would go wrong. By one in the afternoon, I was enjoying myself. Having accepted that the day was going to be a total wash, I found myself laughing at fate’s pathetic attempts to wreck my mood. Stepping in dog poop? Dealing with aggressive beggars? Getting on the wrong train line and ending up in Parkchester? Not a problem. By the time night rolled around, I was daring fate to do her worst.
Bad days are pretty relative. I’ve had friends for whom the wrong color lip gloss or a tiny frizziness could spell a psyche-twisting descent into total misery. On the other hand, I’ve had friends for whom getting a speeding ticket, having food poisoning, and breaking a bone were merely hiccups, easily overcome.
In the annals of bad days, last Tuesday was a doozy. After consistent drops in value over the course of this year, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)’s stock fell 5%, to a nine-month low. For Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this meant a reported personal loss of $8.6 billion dollars. Of course, the misery of this bad day is relative. After all, while their stock loss is much more money than I and everyone I know will make over the course of our entire lives, it only represents a fraction of Brin and Page’s total value. Still, what a killer!
Nobody seems really clear on why Google’s stock has experienced such a precipitous drop in value. The most popular culprit is a report released by comScore, an internet information tracker. According to the report, Google’s “paid click growth,” or the rate at which consumers click on its ads, has reached a plateau. January’s paid-click numbers were approximately the same as those in January 2007. The conventional wisdom seems to be either that Google is beginning to decline in power, or that the plateau represents yet another indicator of an impending recession, as people are apparently less interested in on the internet buying.
Another possibility is that Google has saturated the market and that it has reached some sort of natural limit on world wide web searching and paid clicks. Still, I guess that’s not as exciting. Neither is the assertion by Hitwise, another world wide web information company, that Google’s traffic to retail sites is actually higher than it was last year.
In the case of Google’s stock, which has lost a third of its value in the last couple of months, supposition and conventional wisdom may end up trumping truth. As we listen to dour assertions of a coming economic apocalypse fighting it out with rosy predictions of economic growth, it might be worthwhile to spend a little more time researching the claims that are swirling around. If you’re looking for a good research tool, may I suggest … Google?
Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. He used Google to research this post.
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