google

Ok, I know what they said. They protect human rights and other stuff. But, how come they do it suddenly, they had to follow the government rules since the beginning right, so why do they complain now?

Oh I know, some accounts were hacked! Come on, it’s GOOGLE, every day thousands (or more) of people are trying to hack accounts. It’s bad, but it’s not new.

I have another theory, and I would bet a lot that I am right. Google, the giant, has a weakness that was forgotten, but that the Chinese environment cruelly reminds them.

THEY HAVE ONLY ONE SOURCE OF REVENUES: Adwords. if you attack this one, you attack the heart of their revenue sources.

I know they have few others, but they earn no money, like google apps and so on. That is small money in their turnover.

Click Fraud

What’s going on is that they suffer MASSIVE click frauds. I manage many adwords accounts, and you can see it clearly. When a campaign in china has 99,9% of people who stayed in average less than 0.0 seconds !!!

We can check it by using… google analytics. Or any other live website statistics tool like woopra, clickit or statcounter. To make it clear, they sell advertising to people, and then computers (and not humans) click on the links, make google clients pay, while no one (human) visited the website.

Money lost in the East and the West

Now imagine if everyone in the west learns about it, this will end up in lowering the trust clients have in google to bring them business, and google will lose advertising budgets for their adwords!! Even in the west, where they probably don’t have to face the same problem, people will lower their adwords budgets. This means millions of dollars lost for google.

Money back Warranty?

Actually, it’s even worse than that. How can they give the money back (I know they would, they are not trying to steal) to their clients, while they cannot make the difference between a real visitor, who clicked, and a computer…

Let it be known : baidu, google Chinese competitor, suffers the same syndroms, we managed also campaigns for baidu, but they have the same problem. 99,9% of visitors staying less than zero second, no one asking to chat on the website, etc.

To let you know, we manage adwords campaigns around the world, and there is only in china that we have to suffer these attacks.

Critique of Pure Unreason

To me, that is why Google is threatening to leave. Because they are on the verge of losing millions and millions of dollars. I would be google CEO, I would also leave the place instead of jeopardizing my main markets.

Of Course, they cannot say : you know what, we cannot give our clients their money back, and that’s why we are leaving.  

Last time they spoke about the click fraud, it was only AFTER they could find out which computers were involved, and thus, they could charge their clients honestly. This time, the technology used by those who attack them is a bit trickier I guess, and time came for google to solve the problem differently.

They spoke about cyber attacks; they just weren’t clear about “what kind” of cyber attacks it actually was…

Come on techcrunch crew, go interview some people at Mountain View, and  let it be known.

google buzz is the new attempt from google to enter the social networks sector. it's right within gmail (so you need first a gmail account to use it), and it seems well thaught.

google buzz works also with twitter, flickr, picasa, google reader and other feeds.

Of course (but is it a good idea?) it is not linked with facebook! the king in the world of social networks. i guess when you want his thrown, you don't help him increase his authority.

here under, the text of the video, for those of you who don't have flash insalled.

• The first thing we all do when we find something interesting is share it!
• More and more this kind of sharing takes place online
• google buzz is a new way to share photos, videos, updates, and more...and start conversations about the things you find interesting
• it's built right into gmail and uses the friends you've already made
• there is nothing to set up you're automatically following the people you email and chat with the most
• you can chose to share publically with the world or privately to a small group of your closest friends
• buzz goes beyond status messages, it automatically pulls images from links, plays videos inline, and let's you flip your photos the way there are meant to be seen. Big and Fast
• you can connect other sites you use like Picasa, Flikr, Google Reader and Twitter so your friends can keep up with what you're doing around the web
  all in one place
• buzz makes sure you see the stuff that matters most
• the best part about sharing is getting responses to your posts, buzz sends this comments to your inbox to make sure you don't miss them, you can respond right from there to keep the conversation going
• if you want to make sure your friends see something, you can send it straight to their inbox by adding them with an AT reply
• you sometimes see recommended buzz from people you are not directly following
• buzz identifies posts that may interest you, or are popular among your friends
  and recommends them to you so that you don't miss out
• and it works on your phone, so you can keep up with what your friends, or people near you, are buzzing about
  when you are out in the real world, you usually wanna say something about where you are, buzz makes this easy
• so try it out, click the buzz link in gmail to get started
  or visit buzz.google.com to learn more

   

 oddly enough, I was in a bus saturday in beijing when i saw another bus advertising for google maps! 

A bit weird when you know that google has big chances to leave china. That probably means that people at google china didn't know about google closing down its beijing offices. well...

thanks tim for jumping on your camera when i was shouting to take the picture ;o)