U.S. Search Market is Consolidated. Google to Have 75% Share

eMarketer’s release on its new report that: “There are two giants in the space, and they are getting bigger! Saying that search engine marketing is a highly concentrated industry is an understatement… [my bold]


“Google and Yahoo!’s share of U.S. Paid Search Advertising Spending”
2007 (estimates)
Google: 75.6%
Yahoo!: 16.3%
Total Market Share of the two: 91.9%


“… according to comScore, US Internet users performed 75.8% of their January 2007 searches on Google or Yahoo!, and Nielsen//NetRatings put the combined total at 76.4%… “In fact, over 90% of US paid search ad spending will go to the two search giants in 2007…”
“US spending on search advertising will rise by more than $3.2 billion from 2006 to 2008 alone… Paid search is currently the key driver of US online advertising, and spending on paid search in 2008 will exceed the $9.6 billion that was spent on all online advertising in 2004.”

from: “The Unstoppable Surge of Search Advertising.” April 20, 2007

FTC Filing today on GoogleClick First in a Series of Steps

Today, the Center for Digital Democracy joins with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) in a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about new threats to privacy arising from the proposed takeover of Doubleclick by Google. A copy of the filing can be be found here.

It is critical that both U.S. and E.U. antitrust authorities investigate the impact of this deal on the growing consolidated online advertising marketplace. My group and allies are working on the competition and market structure issues, in addition to concerns about privacy (in the case of the online advertising market, of course, issues related to personal privacy are almost totally intertwined).

The merger between Google and Doubleclick, along with other interactive ad industry consolidation, has greater implications beyond concerns over advertising competition and privacy. Whomever controls the online ad market will determine the range and diversity of content creation and distribution online (through their ability to invest in content sources and services). Antitrust regulators must intervene to protect civil society, including ensuring the funding and availability of news and civic discourse for the digital realm.

Faster Than You Can Say Doubleclick: Google’s YouTube to Collect More Data

From Advertising Age:

excerpt: “Coming this fall from YouTube: richer demographic information.

“We’ll never have had that much data about that much content,” said Suzie Reider, chief marketing officer at YouTube. She was speaking to a group of advertising research executives in New York at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Rethink conference.

“By Q3 we’ll have a tremendous amount of metrics and data around every video,” she said. “There’s lots you can glean from looking at who’s looking at what. It’s a real-time focus group that happens all day, every day.”

“At ARF: YouTube to Get Richer Demo Data.” Abbey Klaassen. Advertising Age. April 17, 2007 [sub required]

Industry Insider Describes

“DoubleClick serves more display ads for more advertisers and more agencies and more publishers than any other company in the world. With this deal, Google now controls more display advertising than any other company, which nicely complements their other businesses where they control more search and contextual advertising than any other company in the world… DoubleClick currently processes more online ad campaigns and more ad transactions than any other company in the world, by far, particularly at the high end of the market. This data is a treasure trove. If Google wanted to, it could know exactly how much money its AdSense distribution partners make from other ad distributors, be they Yahoo! or Advertising.com or MSN. This is very powerful data.

Even if they don’t ever access the data itself, the metadata (the data about the data) is incredibly valuable. It is as if the world’s biggest stock broker just bought the world largest stock exchange. Plus, DoubleClick probably sets more cookies on more consumer browsers than any other company in the world as well.

Just the analysis of this data could yield for Google the keys to dramatically improving the targeting of all of their ads.”

From: “Google/DoubleClick: It’s About Display, Data And Defense.” Curt Viebranz, Online Media Daily. April 16, 2007.

requirements deemed 5500 72p loansac management receivable system credit123 accept online credit paymentsacept credit cardccasino 18casino dice 3advanced solutions creditdiamonds casino 5 Map

From Doubleclicks’ March 2007 study on what it collects via broadband video (my italics):
“DoubleClick…announced the results of its recent research of online video ad placements, illustrating that video is a highly effective format for online advertising. Findings show that audiences have high interaction rates with video ads, users click the “Play” button more than they click on image ads, video ads are typically played two-thirds of the way through and video ad click rates are far higher than those of image format ads.

DoubleClick conducted its analysis of more than 300 online video ad campaigns that were placed by more than 130 advertisers over a four-month period in 2006… The interaction rate is the “all in” metric, including the sum total of all interactions that people have with the video ad units. Those include mouseovers, expansions, interactions with the video control buttons, clicks and other events…. “The best standard data you get on audience measurement of TV commercials is limited to reach and frequency or specialized brand studies. However, online video metrics available today, like interaction rate, play rate, video completion rate and so on, give advertisers much greater insight into how consumers are actually engaging with the ads and their brands,” said Marianne Caponnetto, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for DoubleClick.”

And from Doubleclick’s Dart Motif product:

“Deliver an emotional brand experience with video.
Convey your brand message with believability and emotion by adding Video to your Motif rich media ads. Ads including Video deliver nearly three times higher brand awareness and message association, and more than 100 percent higher purchase intent and online ad awareness than non-rich media ads.”

“Audience Interaction Metrics: Motif’s exclusive Audience Interaction Metrics Package lets you gather data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit including multiple exit links, counters, timers and video metrics. You’ll automatically get metrics on how long each ad was displayed or how the viewer interacted with the ad. Plus, you can customize additional events to track based on your creative concept.”

commission accrediting internationalstatement credit online account book addressinvestors accreditedbalance 0 transfer credit fee cardsfederal credit 66 unionfederal americhoice union creditltv with 125 credit refi pooraccredited investment fiduciary Map

We Need FTC to Protect Privacy. Privacy Groups Should Be Calling for Real Action–not Industry Friendly “Workshops”

My organization and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group have asked the Federal Trade Commission to swiftly act and protect our privacy online. Last November, we filed a lengthy complaint asking for an intervention to stop behavioral targeting [pdf from Doubleclick] and associated spyware. But it seems that some groups aren’t that interested in action. They want the industry bigshots (who may be their funders) to come into the FTC and agree on “best practices.” That will likely mean no real privacy protection. Here’s the excerpt from a CNET story:

“The CDT has urged the FTC to hold a workshop on behavioral targeting to set best practices in the industry and get players like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to agree on them. The organization wants to ensure that people have control in the event that these companies begin to merge consumer information from search and Web-surfing records to personalize ads.”

Privacy groups need to demand that the FTC finish its investigation (it launched one last November as a result of our complaint). We have provided the FTC with so much additional information, they should be able to act by now. Workshops are a delaying tactic designed to help out the special interests. If you want to see just a small fraction of what we’ve sent the FTC investigative team, go to adwatch.

PS: Here’s the blog post from the Center for Democracy and Technology on its request for a FTC workshop. Read its letter to the FTC. Then ask yourself. Shouldn’t public interest groups identify in such a letter the companies which fund them and engage in behavioral targeting? Shouldn’t they acknowledge that one of their key supporters, Microsoft, is the subject of a related complaint now before the FTC? Follow the money and the data mining it helps bring.

Scott Cleland on Google-Doubleclick: `Competition Foreclosure’

We agree with much of Mr. Cleland’s analysis that the Google acquisition of Doubleclick raises serious concerns about the future of the digital marketplace. But, unlike Scott, we believe the deal has critical antitrust implications (and has nothing to do with net neutrality). Here are key excerpts from his longer piece:


“Just as Microsoft vertically-leveraged (bundled/tied) its operating system dominance to dominate the office applications market via the Windows platform, Google apparently looks to vertically-leverage (bundle/tie) its keyword search dominance with DoubleClick’s leadership in online banner/video display advertising, and with its Google-YouTubedominance in video search…This vertical combination reportedly could give Google-DoubleClick upwards of 80% of the overall market for advertisements provided to third-party websites. Just like Microsoft became the default office applications platformfor email, e-calendars, word processing, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint, for any user, Google has obvious designs on becoming the default Internet advertising broker/platform for: keywords, website display ads, and TV, radio, newspaper/magazine advertisingfor the average large advertiser… If Google can gain the first-mover advantages of offering advertisers the super- efficiencies of cross-media-platform advertising optimization, i.e. a vertically-integrated/tied advertising platform, individual advertising mediums and companies will largely be at their (anti-)competitive mercy going forward. Game. Set. Match…The DoubleClick acquisition, like Google’s acquisition of YouTube, is really all about achieving competitive foreclosure long term. Google’s “partnership’ strategy is also all about competitive foreclosure…”

“Google Achieves Behavioral Targeting Nirvana” [recommended reading. Excerpt]

The following in an excerpt from an article by Rich Tehrani, president and editor-in-chief, TNC. We urge everyone to read the entire piece:
“Imagine a world where advertisers would be able to predict your detailed behavior online. They would know when you are about to buy a song, a car, a present for your spouse – they would know virtually everything you are thinking. If you believe this is impossible then you would be wrong as there are a few companies who have access to enough Internet data to make this privacy lover’s nightmare a reality and believe it or not a relatively new science called behavioral targeting is taking the online advertising world by storm… Last week however the game of behavioral targeting got even more competitive as Google announced they are purchasing DoubleClick. DoubleClick is the leading company in the business of displaying advertising online…With the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users. It would be fair to say that greater than 85% of Internet users frequently come into contact with ads served by DoubleClick. In addition there are a vast number of sites serving up Google’s ads and running Google Analytics. Google perhaps now has access to the behavioral information of over 90% of web users.
One can expect Google to start mining DoubleClick’s databases immediately and in the process, cross reference this data with its own vast databases of search history and perhaps even Gmail content.”

U.S. antitrust regulators:

Just a pointer to the U.S. officials who will be reviewing–and hopefully denying–GoogleClick.

Excerpt: “XM Satellite Radio and Google Deliver Targeted Advertising to Satellite Radio Listeners

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., and NEW YORK, NY, August 2, 2006 – Google, Inc., today announced that it has reached an agreement with XM Satellite Radio, the nation’s leading satellite radio service with more than seven million subscribers, (NASDAQ: XMSR) to introduce and make available commercial advertising inventory on XM’s non-music channels to Google’s extensive advertising base through its dMarc media network (www.dmarc.net). As part of the deal, Google advertisers will now have a simple, automated way to reach XM’s millions of subscribers nationwide and XM will have access to Google’s large and small advertisers to offer relevant, targeted messages to their subscribers. After months of trials, the new platform is now in full production giving Google advertisers distribution through XM Satellite Radio…Google AdWords’ customers will be able to place terrestrial and satellite radio spots when the dMarc platform is integrated into AdWords targeted for fourth quarter of this year.”

and from Reuters: Google, Clear Channel Ink US Ad Deal [4/16/2007]
Web search leader Google has broken into radio with a multiyear advertising sales agreement with the largest U.S. broadcaster, Clear Channel Radio, the companies said on Sunday.

The deal, long anticipated by the radio industry, marks the progress Google is making as it expands into off-line media, not just in radio, but also television and newspapers—even in the face of resistance from some traditional media players.

Last week it revealed a parallel deal to supply satellite TV broadcaster EchoStar and its 13 million viewers.

Clear Channel said it has agreed for Google to sell a guaranteed portion of the 30-second spots available on its 675 radio stations in top U.S. markets, in a bid to expand the universe of local radio advertisers to Google’s online buyers.”

sapphic shower movieskelly movies teennotebook quotes movie thestudio movie vegaswife swapping movies911 moviesmovie titles adultass movie Map

Even Microsoft is Worried about GoogleClick

Here’s the Sunday release from Microsoft and a link to a paidcontent.org story on similar corporate competition concerns. Of course, more is at stake, including the future diversity of editorial content online. Whomever controls the interactive ad market will determine much of broadband’s future.

“Microsoft Statement on Proposed Acquisition of DoubleClick by Google”

“Microsoft has released the following statement by Brad Smith, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Microsoft Corporation, on the proposed acquisition of DoubleClick by Google:

“This proposed acquisition raises serious competition and privacy concerns in that it gives the Google DoubleClick combination unprecedented control in the delivery of online advertising, and access to a huge amount of consumer information by tracking what customers do online. We think this merger deserves close scrutiny from regulatory authorities to ensure a competitive online advertising market.”

and from paidcontent.org (excerpt) “Rivals Start Weighing on Google-Doubleclick Deal: Want Close Regulatory Scrutiny
“A flurry of activity over the weekend after Friday’s announcement about Google’s intention to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash. Competitors like Yahoo, Time Warner and Microsoft, all of whom did bid for DCLK, are talking about anti-competitive nature of the deal. The deal will be subject to a review by either the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.
— This is possibly the first time Microsoft has leveled a charge of anti-competitive behavior, reports FT. Between them, Google and DoubleClick account for “over 80 per cent of the adverts delivered to website publishers, so their combination in a single company has big ramifications,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said on Sunday.” [story continues]