Bronte Media

Danny does the best job of straight forward analysis amid the madness of comScore Google click data. Firstly, it’s madness that comScore is actually market moving information. They do their best but ultimately they revise their data infinitum and dont allow trending from more than a year or so ago (even though they’ve been in business for 10 years).

But back to Google. Since November when they said they don’t want crap ads clogging up the right hand side of the page and eroding user trust in Google’s advertising world domination system the percentage of searches with ads has gone from 52% in November to 46% in February (or a decrease of 13%).

Paid clicks have gone from around 610m to 510m, or a decrease of 19%. All this is according to comScore by the way.

But we know that Google had been seeing CPC growth at around 6-7% year over year worldwide (from their SEC Filings) and then in the fourth quarter this jumped to 16%. Even though 33-50% of the quarter didn’t have the new quality score guidelines in place. So we can expect pricing to be up around 20-25% year over year. If it’s not, then Google really might be maturing. If it is, then it’s simply reflective of Google’s longer term strategy with higher quality ads and more user trust (i.e. they dont click on an ad and end up on some piece of shit page with ads blasted on it).

There is one factor that everyone seems to be ignoring as well: Google does half of its business outside the United States (known to Americans simply as ‘International’). Comscore’s click data is US Only. Let me say that again: Comscore’s click data is US only.

Having a liquid net worth of $0 I have no way to put my money where my mouth is. But if I did, GOOG is just screaming to be bought.