Why Google Is Running Away From the Crowd

even the guys who make MSN's search engine admit that). Until we are, Google will continue being rewarded by the market. This reminds me of working on a magazine. See, Google isn't a search company. It's in the audience aggregation business. Get an audience together and then figure out how to serve advertising to that audience. Lots of people think Google is a search company. It's not. This is why Google probably doesn't care too much about newer search engines like Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, Sphere, or Exalead (all of which have some search advantages over Google). Google just wants to make sure they have the biggest audience (and smartest, and richest, and youngest). Do you have a way to attract an audience on the Internet? That's what the business types at the big companies are looking for. Do you have a way to serve better advertising to those audiences? That's what they are looking for too. There's business opportunities in those two places. The trick is, getting an audience is getting harder due to the choices we all have as to where to spend our time (and our money). The more choices there are, the harder it is to get any decent sized audience. And on the advertising side, getting advertisers to feel comfortable spending money on your service will be hard. I remember when I helped run a camera store in Silicon Valley. We used to advertise in the Yellow Pages. Lots of other competitors would always pitch us on spending money with them. So we tried the alternative once. It didn't work. So we went back to where the audience was. You want to know where the money is in the internet advertising business? Follow the audience. That's where it's going to be. Robert Scoble is the founder of the PodTech.net's Vice President of Media Development.

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