Friday, February 9, 2007

Which of These Google Predictions Do You Believe Will Happen?
By Oren Goldschmidt

1. YouTube will adopt inline ads for all content, followed by “pay to play" for large advertisers including promotion and ultimately; a paid “premium” service to opt out of all the advertising.
2. Google will start selling ’Google Checkout’ (They’ll change the name to GCash first, though) cards in denominations $5, $10, $25, $50 and $rechargeable (Available at actual offline merchants) and then start establishing a micropayments system for services (Sub-cent transactions). These cards will be accepted at Google sites and at content vendors (First one up; The New York Times – they’ve had a hard-on for paid content since the day nytimes.com launched). This will be the next adwords, and they’ll be making a billion in revenue off of it in the first 12 months (everyone will simply have to try it at least once, you know, because it’s like – Google Cash!
3. Google will begin ’shaving’ profit at the expense of adsense users – ultimately reaching a 10 - 12.5 percent reduction in adsense revenue for publishers by the third quarter of ’06 (Even if they don’t “need” the specific revenue, they’re under pressure to maximize their adwords profits and must show a given quarter to quarter growth...)
4. They’re already looking for ways to create a premium layer for certain services, notably; Gmail, Analytics, Blogger & Maps (look out for the checkout card).
5. They will stop buying content-driven companies (They bought YouTube instead of spending the requisite $100 on graphic-design for Google Video. A prettier and more intuitive Google Video would have easily killed YouTube)
6. They will, however, make an exception for NetVibes, Technorati or Craigslist (All three of which are better than than them in one of their target Niches)
7. “Google Life” will – if it’s released – suck. Second Life is equal to real-life in only one way – It’s unsustainable and fleeting. The bandwidth and server costs are disturbing and Google’s only way to avoid that would be to outsource the heavy lifting to the client side which would make it agonizingly slow. Wait until at least ’09 for this to become feasable.
8. After the “Great YouTube/Sequoia Cash-out of Q1 ’07” is over several new and innovative (yet half-baked) products will be launched. Feeling pressure to justify their exorbitantly inflated p/e ratio, we’ll be seeing 3 or 4 products intended for launch in late ’07 or early ’08 going into Beta half concocted (Late april-ish).
9. Google will make a large contribution to the WikiMedia foundation. Along with the contribution will come a request stating that the first paragraph of each WikiPedia article be reviewed by editors and subsequently locked from editing. This will enable google to have a “Synopsis" for almost any subject, and this will be used for a future “Google Knowledge” service.
10. And just as an aside; New services will sport a slight logo redesign (3 Colorful spheres, slightly desaturated color-wise from the present stock to the left and a cobalt blue Google logo, still serif’d but in a font with a nicer capital “G”) because the current one exudes a whimsiness that is a psychological stumbling block for investors and clients.

Feel free to vote in the comments (“1, 3, 5 & 8 will happen, the rest are nonsense and you, Oren, are an idiot” – for example).

Which of These Google Pre ... by Oren Goldschmidt | Comments (11)

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