Google Boots IncrediMail; Stock Price Plummets

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1. Spez Smartman
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:35 am

   Another reason why this is Bubble 2.0. Any viable business can’t rely on one revenue stream.

   I wish the webmasters who want to make $$$ on the internet would leave and those who are pro-open source and who are more concerned with making the web a better place would stay — a la pre- to mid-1990s internet.

   Sure a lot of good sites were created during both bubbles, but it still isn’t worth the silliness that is current going on.

2. Michael Arrington
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:38 am

   “Any viable business can’t rely on one revenue stream”

   well, sure they can. Take our entire defense industry, for example. They seem pretty viable.

   CPC advertising has made whole new classes of startups viable. It’s just that if it’s your only revenue source, there’s an extra risk. Saying a business with only one revenue stream isn’t viable is, in my opinion, overly simplifying things and incorrect.

3. MistaPrimeMinista
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:42 am

   There is only one lesson to take from this. Blogs and companies need to learn to diversify their ads. Adsense is not the only reliable source of income.

4. Michael Arrington
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:47 am

   $3 - or, avoid fraud and other stuff that pisses Google off. Let’s wait and see why they were banned.

5. teknozat
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:47 am

   Yes i agree adsense shoulnt be the only resource of income!

6. heddy
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:51 am

   Take our entire defense industry, for example. They seem pretty viable.

   Crappy counter-example. The defense industry relies on an established and well-known revenue stream which is confirmed years in advance by the defense budget. It’s like saying, hey that Coke company relies on those people who drink for their business. If people stop drinking, what’s gonna happen?

   Incredimail relied on Google for its business which makes decisions in ways that no one knows and can choose to stop things instantly.

7. zeke
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:51 am

   a few days ago people outraged by yahoo disabling someone’s account for fraudulent clicks,

   http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....nsactions/

   now, google booted a whole company’s adsense account for fraudulent behaviors, and people seems OK with it.

   i am amazed.

8. Karthick
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:54 am

   Ad model is not a sustainable business model. If you want to start a company with ads as the revenue model, then think twice. What if, at some point, the advertisers start thinking that ROI on Adsense or Adcenter is not good and stop giving ads? Many people want to help the author/service provider, so they click on ads just to help the website. Finally, it is going to hit the ROI of advertiser and the website.
   A viable business model apart from the ad model is need of the hour. May be micropayment will be one solution or blogs joining hands and creating a subscription for 100 blogs in one shot..something like this might be the solution but ads will never be end-all, solve-all solution.

9. Synonyms.net
   

   January 14th, 2008 at 1:56 am

   Quigo’s Adsonar is an equivalent substitute to Google AdSense on the CPC advertising market and usually result in higher CPMs.

   In addition I don’t know that Google, Yahoo and MSN share information about fraudulent activities on their ad network.

10. Binaryday
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:00 am

    One of the reasons I have been using adsense is that I do not want to focus on getting advertisers at this stage. I shall rather spend that time getting new users rather than getting advertisers.

    However this event forces me to rethink the assumption as investors will be skeptical about putting money into a company that is dependent on adsense for its 100% revenue.

    @MA, may be you should start a discussion about what are the pros and cons of these approaches
    1) focus on users, use adsense to build up your cash reserve
    2) focus on advertisement streams right from the beginning

11. Raghu Kulkarni
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:21 am

    Google Adsense the new Microsoft Office ?

    Need of the hour is a Web 2.0 company that creates a better adsense program; I bet that this web 2.0 company will blow most other startups away! This is not to say that the google adsense is bad; it is just that the google adsense now works more like ‘office’ product for Microsoft, a near monopoly making billions on a product with huge margins.

12. Chris
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:22 am

    The problem is Incredimail has too many spyware and it causes havoc on computers. Why you don’t try downloading Incredimail and see for yourself. It was an excellent program at the beginning but later it added too many spywares.

13. Jason
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:23 am

    I hope that Google realizes that by taking actions like this without making public a good explanation of why they disabled this company’s ads, they are costing themselves a lot of revenue. Google’s AdSense is nothing more than a middleman. If other large websites know that their revenues could be halted without much of a reason, they will know not to rely on Google and start looking at alternatives, such as other networks or direct ads. Without publishers AdSense would die just as quickly as without advertisers. There have been many disturbing reports showing that Google treats even large publishers not as partners but as easily replaceable 2nd-class citizens.

14. shams
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:27 am

    No. 6, I agree with you. Comparing defense industry with online advertising is quite funny .

15. I Am Not Posting To Spam My Blog
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:46 am

    The other thing about the defense industry is that arms companies, at least the big ones, don’t sell solely to the government of the country in which they are based. They can also sell to other friendly governments, or they can sell to third parties who will sell it on to unfriendly governments, paramilitaries, etc. Since people always fight, the defence industry is one of those lucky industries that will never be short of customers. Rather like staple foods and prostitution.

16. Google is your friend. Google is your fr...
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:52 am

    Now go tell people to keep politics out of this blog after your defense industry example. Admit, you meant armed conflicts as the streams and there is no shortage under the current administration

    Kicking a large advertiser from AdSense is a good thing for the Internet because the advertising money will flow into small ad networks making them stronger competitors.
    Removing the site from the search would be much worse.

17. Pascal Rossini
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:54 am

    I wrote a post on this risky CPC adsense business model for web 2.0 companies few weeks ago

    “Don’t monetize this type of service with Adsense or another Self service solution in CPC or CPA, it’s a decoy, an aberration because you don’t have control, or durable revenues”

    http://www.pascalrossini.com/wordpress_eng/?p=370

18. Technicle
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 2:57 am

    IncrediMail for a long time has been well known to be problematic, but the tyranny of Google is mind-boggling.

19. Jon
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 3:18 am

    Diversification is key to longterm survival of ANY business, Google is doing it successfully, Microsoft isn’t but if you rely on one customer (in this case Google) for your revenues, that ship had a very shallow keel that should have been dealt with aggressively way before this happened. Their ship flipped over along with the lives of a number of other people, maybe it couldn’t be avoided in this case but they sure as heck could have done things to soften the blow.

    Jon
    http://buzvia.com - Share Influence

20. Tcruncher2
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 3:23 am

    Seems that Google can kill companies just as easily as they can create them. I wrote a post on why I think Googles algorithm has a serious flaw and why mahalo etc will be dominate forces in the future.

    http://www.timdavis.com.au/?p=12

21. Joe
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 3:23 am

    This is a perfect exhample as to why one company can have to much power,Google just put a lot of people out of business.

    If this had been Microsoft or Yahoo the internet would be up in arms, Google needs to reply.

22. Marek
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 3:46 am

    Hey, let’s hear the reasons first before making hasty judgements shall we?

23. Ree Tanjuatco
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 3:56 am

    Scarey :-O

24. Sunny Kalara
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 4:15 am

    Here is a clue as to why Google might have terminated the adsense with Incredimail:

    Weiss does not think the company is clear on why Google made its decision, but said it “speculated that it may center around their opt-in policies relating to the way that IncrediMail is bringing in searches.”

25. Binaryday
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 4:45 am

    That is the problem, we do not have the answers. Noone finds fault with google for removing an adsense account.

    The problem is that we do not know why they were removed. That gives rise to the fear that will I be the next. Just imagine if you were planning to leave your day job to work on your website and your website earns only from adsense. This definitely makes you nervous.

    IMHO Google should let the world know why they removed that particular publisher. Then I can check if I am violating any of those terms. Then I can have a good night’s sleep.

    End of the day I think that we should not forget that it is adsense that made lot of these web 2.0 companies possible. That way google has done lot of good and I am confident that google will have a really good reason for removing one of the largest publishers from the network.

26. Mamo Debele
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 4:56 am

    A couple of years ago I had a startup that was making a few thousand dollars a month from the Adsense program. All of a sudden Google disabled the program without any explanation. To this day they refuse to explain their reason except to say I did something against their rules. I had no chance to defend myself as I didn’t know what I am accused of doing. Needless to say the business soon went under, as I had no alternative to Adsense. I am still amazed there is no large scale revolt against Google’s heavy handed approach, as well as by the lack of alternative to Adsense.

    Mamo

27. gregory
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 5:18 am

    google is more the messenger in this case, don’t shoot it, incredimail got zapped for narrow greed

28. Josiah
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 6:16 am

    Mamo: The ‘large scale revolt’ will come from Google, it will just take more time (maybe late 2008-09) as most of the influential tech voices are still in their “honeymoon’ phase with Google and have yet to wake up to their rather evil habits related to the advertising business.

    Watching 60 minutes last night made me realize why people idolize Google like they do … starry-eyed reporters used to do fluff pieces like that for Sergy, Larry and the GOOG.

29. Rajeev
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 6:27 am

    Cool Info I think Google has proper filters in place to recognise true web sites and pays more CPC to those which are regular sites than just ad based.

    http://tekno-world.blogspot.com

30. ratan
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 6:50 am

    ouch. they lost 40% of their value just because Google dropped them. I guess people can’t live without Google anymore.. scary in a way.

31. Bipin
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 6:57 am

    The incredimail service is an application that slaps smiley faces in your email. Besides being annoying it probably never received approval for bundling the Google products with its app and it probably was inserting Google code (read ads) via its app which is a no-no. “No AdSense code may be integrated into a software application.”

    Adsense TOS is pretty clear on this stuff.

32. David Litsky
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 7:48 am

    Another reason to diversify your revenue streams, although Google has a problem with that themselves.

33. panefsky
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 8:28 am

    Bad times for startups…

34. Larry Larrikin
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 9:00 am

    Click fraud can be a big problem when you have a microcap public company that relies on Adsense for most of their revenues. The company insiders and employees can be totally honest but some fraudulent shareholders (or short-sellers) can get the whole thing shut down.

    And how about this: if there was a company that for some reason you didn’t like (a competitor?), and they relied on Adsense for their revenues, you could hire a click-farm to hit the ads on their site, get them busted for fraud and shut them down. And they would have no way to defend themselves!?

    I have to think that CPC won’t be with us for much longer.

35. Donv69
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Here we go. Google is turning into the new Microsoft. So many companies are depending on Google for their survival that Google has the power to inflict severe damage onto them quite easily simply by removing them from search results, disabling their adsense account or disabling their GoogleMaps API key.

    Really there’s not much anyone can do about it since Google isn’t going after the firms its killing. Those firms really come to Google willfully.

36. Observer
    

    January 14th, 2008 at 1:49 pm

    Good to see google keeping an eye on fraudulent activity involving its adsense framework.Incredimail is an annoying email service with lot of spyware and it seems Incredimail got booted because of its greed and there by its stupid actions not limited to inserting adsend code using its own application rather than let the google adsense program do that.

    That is a clear abuse of the adsense model and shows the desire for quick money from Incredimal’s side.

    I think monitoring such fraudulent activity by itself is going to be a huge business.

37. Kittycat
    

    January 18th, 2008 at 5:54 pm

    I have used incredimail for over 3 years and never had one problem.
    I don’t use the icons unless it’s for a special reason and only to
    special people. I have never understood some of the complaints people
    have said about they can’t do this or that with their mail. It is so simple on
    incredimail. Sorry to hear this has happened.

38. bonchibuji
    

    January 22nd, 2008 at 2:12 am

    i agree with no.1. some one has to come with a new payper click ad company that has the potential to undermine google’s monopoly..