When you hear the word Google, you think of it as a giant company that makes hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and a tech giant that has almost no competitor. Also, in many people’s perspectives, they think Google is a good company as they give almost all of its services like Google Chrome and Android free of charge. While this is true, there is a dark side of Google that I think will surely make Google collapse and go bankrupt. The reason is given below.
Google’s parent company is Alphabet. In 2020, Alphabet generated almost $183 billion in revenue. Of that, $147 billion (over 80%) came from Google’s ads business. And YouTube has a big role to play in the huge revenue of Google’s ads. Everyone knows YouTube and we watch videos from it every day. YouTube primarily earns revenue by showing ads to the viewers while watching videos. For a long time, people think this was a blessing as years ago, people take money for watching videos. Now, YouTube is letting you watch videos for free in exchange for watching ads posted by them.
For many years, this was good as the ads were short and we can skip the ads after watching for at least 5 seconds. Moreover, the number of ads per video is only 1 or 2 for a 10-minute video. So, people really like it. But now, things are different. Due to the pandemic, many businesses need to run ads to stay in business, or else they will be forced to go out of business. So, the number of advertisers increases, and more ads are shown per video.
YouTube also does not enable us to skip videos for 10 seconds for some videos. This is really frustrating as they are becoming gluttons and want to make more money. If the number of advertisers is more than viewers, then they should limit the number of advertisers or whatever. When they don’t allow us to skip videos for 10 seconds, it was really frustrating. But now when I watched a video, for some ads they don’t allow us to skip ads for 20 seconds. What the hell is this? I mean they are forcing us to view ads for not 5 seconds, not 10 seconds but 20 goddamn seconds. Also, they are not only showing one or two ads per video, they are showing 4 to 5 ads for a 10-minute video. This is the starting of the collapse of their empire. If they don’t correct their mistake, some competitors will come up and kick them out from this game. Since they are a technology company, they have very few assets so they will go bankrupt very soon. It is very easy to kill these technology companies. People will dislike Google so they shift to another competitor. It only takes a few minutes to shift to another competitor so technology companies can lose all their users and go bankrupt even within a month. Think of Yahoo. Years ago, it seems as if there is no competitor for Yahoo. Then, Google came and they are forced to sell to Verizon at only $5 billion. Around 10 years ago, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44 billion but Yahoo refused. 10 years later, they are forced to sell it to Verizon for a paltry sum of only $5 billion.
History will repeat itself if Google’s glutton of money does not stop and they need to correct themselves before it’s too late. There is one solution to this. According to various reports, it is found that showing ads forcefully has a much lower conversion rate than showing ads to people willingly. It makes sense as if somebody shows an ad that you don’t wanna watch, you will not pay any attention. So, you will not know about the product, and many others will act like you. So, the advertiser will get a much lesser conversion rate. To get a higher conversion rate, you need to advertise who willingly says “Yeah, I wanna see this kind of ad”. How do you do that? By sharing some of your revenues with the viewers. If I get some money to watch ads how small the amount is, I will be interested in watching the ads and even watch more ads than before. Like this, Google’s revenues can increase dramatically while at the same time satisfying their customers and clients. We watchers will be happy as we get money for watching the video and the advertiser will also be happy because their conversion rate will be higher. One browser, Brave has started doing this kind of advertising. So, let us all wait and watch how long Google will take to change its advertising strategy.
One last thing. Many of you will say that advertising is necessary for content creators to earn some money. If they don’t get money, they will stop creating contents and there will be a problem. Yeah! I know that. I am not saying we should stop advertising. I am saying that the advertising strategy should be changed so that both content creators and viewers benefit. Viewers and readers are the reason why we content creators earn money. The viewers can also get some money for reading blogs or watching videos. Imagine how happy they would be and it would increase website traffics exponentially which is good for content creators and advertisers. Instead of getting frustrated by ads, they would be happy to watch it now. This is what I think will be the best advertising strategy.
THE ONE WHO PUT THIS ADVERTISING STRATEGY INTO PRACTICE WILL BE THE NEXT GOOGLE OR MICROSOFT.
Knowledge Glutton 