Google: Even Better Than The Real (Time) Thing?

As we all know, Facebook were the top dog in social networking until Twitter came along and started to steal some of its thunder with the introduction of real time search. So in August, Facebook upped their game with the $50 million purchase of Friend Feed. Many commentators at the time said that the ability of Facebook to improve its real time search offering using Friend Feed's technology, whilst not the fabled ‘Google killer' many are waiting for, was something that would really affect the way users look at search and at least would make the boffins in Mountain View do some serious thinking. Do users want ‘algorithm search' based on how people link to each other like the current model of Google (and, though not executed as well, Bing which also now provides the organic results for Yahoo as well) or a ‘social graph' based on people's relationships and conducted in real time like Twitter and Facebook/Friend Feed?

Google know that real time could be the future and the fact that they hadn't managed to get on top of that was a real concern. Google did launch "Search options" in May, allowing users to filter their search by different types of results (videos, forums, and reviews), by time (recent, past 24 hours, past week, past year), as well as seeing related searches, a "wonder wheel" view, or a timeline view. But that's not "real time search", is it?

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that month, "Google has done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis... We will do a good job of things now we have these examples."

And, true to their word, on October 21^st there were some big announcements.

At the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, the President of Microsoft's Online Services Group, Qi Lu announced the integration of real time Tweets into Bing.  Later, the same day Google's Marissa Mayer announced the same thing for the market leaders as well as a new Google Labs product called "Social Search". This is a new feature that allows the user to see results for queries from people in their social network.  According to Tech Crunch, it is likely that these updates will only be included if the data is open, which would seem to exclude Facebook but not Twitter (as long as the Twitterer doesn't lock their Tweets). This could be huge for Twitter in terms of taking their offering to the next level and who knows, this deal may mean that they may actually make some money now, though CEO Evan Williams told the New York Times that "revenue was not the focus of the deals." Of course, Bing and Google have slightly different algorithms so observing the difference in how they filter useful Tweets for the user will be interesting but it does seem a natural next stage for the search giants to include these updates in their results, just as they currently do for news stories, much to the intransigent chagrin of, for example, Rupert Murdoch or Sly Bailey.

So is this going to drive more people to use Twitter or has their uptake peaked making this just a new way of cluttering up increasingly option heavy search results on Google's once famously clean pages? Are these Tweets, unfairly dismissed as inane chatter by some, going to improve searchers' experience or should Google just be concentrating on improving their ever changing algorithm which is the best we have but by no means perfect? Only time will tell but the outcome may dictate the way search evolves in the foreseeable future.

Media owners and the move to paid content

Well, it looks like they're going to give it a go. With display ad revenues not enough to make substantial, or indeed any, profit, according to a survey from the Association of Online Publishers, around 70% of online publishers in the newspaper, magazine or TV industries will pay for content online.

I believe that a lot of them will be heading for a fall. There are simply too many of these mass media dinosaurs providing content that is too similar and usually available for free somewhere else. But admittedly, there are some big brands here with sometimes over 200 years of audience building, so surely that will count for something?

The truth is that no one really knows but last week a paidContentUK/Harris Interactive poll showed that only 5% of people who read a news site at least once a month would pay for online access. Though if a free or discounted subscription to a printed paper were thrown in as well, that would rise to 48%. A huge leap. As a Guardian reader to has seen the price of the paper hit the £1 barrier for the first time, I find this idea is particularly appealing and as newspapers make far more money from advertising that cover price, it could be an option. Albeit surely quite a radical one.

In the Guardian last week Andrew Freeman, Harris's senior technology, media and telecoms consultant, said that this model of combining charges together for printed and digital content is "an interesting possible picture of the future": "The value of this type of reader, engaged with the content, and (because of the subscription structure) much more likely to be brand loyal, would be massively higher to advertisers. If newspapers can deliver this sort of model - combining the best of both media within a paid-for relationship, then the future will be more certain, but certainly different."

Unfortunately the bad news is that "when asked the maximum amount they would be prepared to pay, respondents who read a free news site at least once a month gave us [the poll] the lowest possible amount in each category - annual subscriptions under £10, a day pass costing under £0.25 and per-article fees of between 1p and 2p". I still believe that there are not enough newspapers readers that are loyal enough to a brand for all the current national brands to survive this change, and for those that survive this digital/print mixed subscription could be the way forward but these numbers don't really seem strong enough to prop up the bank balance of national newspapers, especially when ad revenues will be affected by the fall in traffic that will surely come from putting up a paywall.

Moreover, yesterday in the Guardian, the same poll asks about how those payments would manifest themselves and it would seem that the preferred method of carrying out this revolution (and it really is no less than that) is by no means decided.

53% of consumers said that they would prefer a subscription of up to a year which will upset the champions of the latest media wunderkind- the micro payment. Paying a few pence per article is the method that many have put forward as something more appealing to consumer especially since Google revealed a fortnight ago that they would roll out their out system of micro payments, possibly as an extension of Google Checkout, in a document sent to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request for paid-content proposals that the association sent to several technology companies.

Freeman says, ""There's been a lot of buzz about micro-payment recently, and some prominent players, like Google, have moved into this field, but there are massive challenges: and not just technical ones. From a simple business point of view, micropayments are disproportionately expensive to administer until you have an enormous volume and value, it just won't be worthwhile. If consumers are going to give up their preference for single-subscription payments they can more easily check and monitor, they will need to have real confidence and trust in the brands they use. Micropayments will probably benefit only the very largest of companies."

Not good news for all but very few large scale media owners who want to make money from content. Long established institutions will fall before a system is settled upon, that much seems certain.

Surfing the Google Wave

Yes, sorry - I did just do that.

So this week we have been playing with that over-hyped new toy from Google, Wave. If you aren't familiar with it (and at the moment invites are like gold dust!) then it is basically a combination between email, IM and a wiki. You setup a 'Wave' and pick who is part of the Wave (from just yourself, up to everyone who uses the system) and then just typing... Content is updated in real time so if multiple users are looking at the same wave at the same time you can see the content being changed in front of your eyes - it's a little unnerving knowing all those typos could be being watched! Text and gadgets can be added, meaning you could add videos etc, but the overall flow of Waves, at the moment at least, is fairly basic.

Innevitably people are already asking what, exactly, is the point of all this?

And I'm not going to pretend I have the answer... What I can say however is that whilst it doesn't necessarily do anything wholely new, it does a unique combination of common things. By allowing users to edit text and documents together it provides a neat platform for collaboration, although in reality most businesses would be better off using Google Docs - and quite why more businesses don't is beyond me (it's free and very easy to share and collaborate over documents). But it also provides and easy way to keep a threaded conversation that remains persistent - useful for keeping track of projects for example.

Ultimately it's still early days - it took years for people to stop looking down at Twitter (and many still do) so I wouldn't expect everyone to jump on Wave just yet but it is encouraging to see Google finally bring something potentially revolutionary to the table, rather than simply gently evolving what others have done (see search, paid search, email and even the failed Knol.

So what do people think? Has anyone got on board yet?

TV eats digital dust

What a week - if you work in digital media you would have had to have your head buried in the sand to have not heard about this news by about 9:05am on Wednesday this week, let along Friday afternoon. But just in case you missed it: the IAB's latest spend figures finally brought the news that we've all been waiting for - in H1 2009 online advertising spend overtook TV ad spend for the first time, (sort of) giving it a larger share of spend than any other media.

The actual figures then - online ad spend grew by 4.6% but, in the context of a market that saw an overall contraction of 16.6%, this translated into a whopping jump in market share, up from 18.7% for the same period in 2008 to 23.5%!

As soon as the news broke there was much discussion at LBi as to whether the counting was fair - should digital really be lumped all into one or should it be split into display, search, affiliates and beyond?  To me this seemed a bit like the equivalent of saying DRTV, product placement and the sponsorship of X Factor should all be counted separately and I couldn't help but argue that just because tv is so one dimensional doesn't mean the rest of us deserve to get a raw deal when the money gets counted.  When you look across the other categories though, it is obvious that by that logic digital still has a way to go if it wants to have the largest share of spend - in the IAB's number print is actually split into classified and display, despite the fact that no such distinction is made for digital.

At the end of the day of course none of this is particularly important - as an agency or advertiser if you are buying in traditional and digital media (I don't, thankfully!) it may mean you should reconsider the respective weighting of your team.  What is important is how your channels work together and that's what advertisers need to be focused on, not which is biggest. The big takeaway though? That 16.6% decline in spend... We're still in a recession, folks, even if the sun shines on digital.