Adsense - A Rising Tide

There is a saying and it goes like this. "A rising tide lifts all ships." So in the case of Google, its advertising off-shoot Adsense, and all those little bloggers out there (and yes that includes me), then the rising tide theory is most certainly true! Targeted advertising has been showing itself as an effective way of getting a sellers message across for a while now, but if you want my opinion, the growth and impact of it has only just begun.

So did the tide lift all of the ships? Umm I can think of a few ships out there that have sprung so many leaks and are taking so much water, that they can't bail out the incoming flood fast enough. I can't say much for media organisations around the world but I have come across a few articles about the radio and television stations located here in Australia. Most of them are saying that their advertising revenue has stalled and in some cases fallen. Have they sunk? I wouldn't say that, but they are starting to cotton on, and their attention is focused on the internet because that is where they say the money has gone and even more will flow that way in the future.

So there are those media ships that have some serious leaks and I reckon there are a few more from other areas. Reading the articles about the media organisations noticing a stalled or declining revenue stream, and then coming across a few more articles about Microsoft planning to ditch Hotmail and launch Live, it made me wonder that maybe there are some really big ships out there that have also sprung a few leaks. And I don't think it is just Microsoft. I think Yahoo is in the same boat!

And to top all that off I come across another article that suggests that Microsoft and Yahoo have been in talks about a merger or an agreement in order to be able to take on Google. Is Microsoft up to its old trick of cosying up to a rival to get as much info from it so that it can compete against it, and it's biggest rival Google? Hmmmm......so I guess it aint just the media companies that are scratching their heads asking themselves "how do we get around this?"

Yahoo have had great success with it's "MyYahoo" setup, where users can customise their pages and add dynamic RSS feeds to their hearts content. I sense that Google will soon head in a similar direction and copy Yahoo, and Microsoft has already started testing a similar service called "live.com". How about a "MyGoogle"? Yahoo have their MyYahoo, but they don't have the targeted advertising like Google's Adsense. Or at least they didn't have up until recently.

What do I think will happen? Well Microsoft is just way too greedy to work out a way around all this. Yahoo? maybe, but they are also becoming way too commercial. So in making those assumptions and comments I better elaborate. Microsoft and Yahoo to a point are so commercial that they don't even give little people like me an opportunity. Google makes money, but they aren't so greedy as to cut little people like me out of the deal. They give people an opportunity and in the process create a phenomena that starts to grow and grow. Just like a snowball rolling down a mountain. And guess what?

Google becomes a raging success and rips the rug out from underneath Microsoft's feet. Will this new live.com initiative from Microsoft turn the tide? I'll be having a good look at it when it is released officially and I have looked at the beta, but I have already passed judgment and I don't think they will be able to plug the leaks. There is nothing wrong with being commercial, but even I cringe when I see what some companies get upto, and Microsoft is one of those companies. That is the reason why I think they will fail. They just won't give people like me an opportunity like Google has.

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