June 14th, 2007 by James Omdahl
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Google is getting a reputation for being cocky. Unfortunately, small marketers like you or I don’t really have the financial leverage to call Google on its cockiness, so we tend to accept it, bow our heads and continue to shell out cash to the Google juggernaut.
Luckily, there is one big company who has the guts to stand up to Google when it’s being, well, a bit of a jerk - that company is eBay.
A quick recap for those of you who missed the headlines:
EBay is having its huge eBay Live conference this week in Boston, and Google decided to crash the eBay lovefest with a big blowout promoting its Google Checkout product. This doesn’t sound terrible, but Google Checkout is not supported by eBay, since eBay owns the extremely profitable company PayPal. Google promoted its Checkout party with fliers containing slogans like “Let Freedom Ring” on them, inferring that eBay oppressing its users by forcing them to use PayPal. Not exactly something you should do to a business partner.
The party and slogans pushed eBay over the edge, so they decided to something unprecedented - shut down their US AdWords account!
That’s right, eBay actually stood up to big G and shut off their AdWords ads yesterday…a move that could potentially cost Google a little under $25,000,000 per quarter. Not a ton of money when you consider Google brought in $3.7 billion last quarter, but still, I see it as a high profile example of how Google’s cockiness towards its partners can and will backfire.
I suppose only time will tell if this incident will lead to a larger move within Google to start considering how their actions and perceived superiority complex will hurt their business in the long run. My hope is that eBay’s move will at least start some discussions within the Googleplex of how they should treat all of their partners, big and small.
The latest update on this story is that Google has cancelled their Checkout party. As far as I know, eBay’s ads are still turned off.
Facts and figures from this post came from the New York Times article. Also read up on all the scuttlebutt around this story at Search Engine Land.
Related posts:
- Yahoo and eBay - The Match Made in, ummmm Looks like Yahoo and eBay are teaming up against rivals...
- Google AdWords on the Radio? What? Google just announced that it has purchased dMarc Broadcasting,...
- Andrew Goodmans “21 Powerful Google AdWords Tips and Techniques” One resource that I often recommend to new AdWords users...
- Google Checkout I first saw this on the news last night and...
- Heads Up - Google AdWords Changing Display URL Policy This may or may not matter to you depending on...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
June 17th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Well as much as I like it when a company is given a wakeup call. Ebay needs one just as much.