{"id":2260,"date":"2008-02-29T23:07:52","date_gmt":"2008-03-01T04:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/02\/29\/google-to-comscore-you-owe-us-15-billion\/"},"modified":"2008-02-29T23:07:52","modified_gmt":"2008-03-01T04:07:52","slug":"google-to-comscore-you-owe-us-15-billion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/02\/29\/google-to-comscore-you-owe-us-15-billion\/","title":{"rendered":"Google to ComScore: You owe us $15-billion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, comScore released a report looking at Google&#8217;s click-through rates for January, which showed a precipitous decline &#8212; and that in turn caused a similar precipitous decline in the company&#8217;s share price, slicing about $15-billion or so worth of market value from the stock in a single day&#8217;s worth of trading. Now, the traffic-measuring company says that it has <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.barrons.com\/techtraderdaily\/2008\/02\/29\/comscore-weak-paid-clicks-reflect-google-policy-shifts\/\">looked more closely<\/a> at the report and come to the conclusion that the decline was the result of Google&#8217;s attempts to improve the quality of the ads that are generated when people do a search. <\/p>\n<p>The slide in Google&#8217;s shares wasn&#8217;t all comScore&#8217;s fault, of course. In some ways, it was like the proverbial straw that broke the camel&#8217;s back. Investors have spent the past few months getting progressively more and more concerned about the U.S. economy and the effects of a recession on online advertising &#8212; and Google is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alleyinsider.com\/2008\/2\/comscore_on_comscore_google_disaster__no_big_deal\">poster child for online advertising<\/a>, since that makes up about 90 per cent of its revenues, and therefore justifies about 90 per cent of its multibillion-dollar valuation. All those fears were crystallized with the comScore report.<\/p>\n<p>Still, it seems more than a little disingenuous for the company to be coming out with a <a href=\"http:\/\/digitaldaily.allthingsd.com\/20080229\/comscore-goog-follo\/\">fuller investigation<\/a> of the click-traffic results after the horse has already stampeded from the barn, in a sense. Couldn&#8217;t comScore have seen this one coming? Given the nervousness around online ads, the news that click-through rates had fallen by 7 per cent in a single month was almost sure to set off a firestorm. It might have been nice to throw a few of those caveats in there at the time. Oh well &#8212; a billion here, a billion there. C&#8217;est la vie. I&#8217;m sure Google will get over it.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, comScore released a report looking at Google&#8217;s click-through rates for January, which showed a precipitous decline &#8212; and that in turn caused a similar precipitous decline in the company&#8217;s share price, slicing about $15-billion or so worth of market value from the stock in a single day&#8217;s worth of trading. Now, the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/02\/29\/google-to-comscore-you-owe-us-15-billion\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Google to ComScore: You owe us $15-billion&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}