Conflict of Interest?
November 19th, 2013Google is basically the be-all end-all of internet search engines. There are comparables, Microsoft’s Bing, but these alternative services a far cry short of being recognized as a verb in the English language. Holding such a position comes with numerous benefits the biggest and perhaps most obvious of which being the advertising revenue. Companies looking for exposure through search hits advertise through Google to the point where certain broad search terms have been bid up to an exorbitant pay per click price. In recent years Google has expanded its service to numerous different facets of the electronic world including hardware. Perhaps the most successful extension of the Google brand has been their web-browser, Google Chrome, which enjoyed a meteoric rise to popularity.
One of the most popular features of Chrome has been AdBlock, a service provided by Google which hides Advertising that would otherwise be displayed in your browser. The most prevalent users of AdBlock tend to be people who wish to skip through ads at the start of YouTube videos, YouTube of course being a subsidiary of Google. So here we have a company that draws in more advertising revenue than any other search or video platform that is subsequently giving consumers, the same consumers targeted by the companies paying for these ads, the ability to ignore the paid ads entirely. Is it a move to maintain their pristine image in the eyes of consumers while inundating those who don’t use their products with ads? Probably not but regardless if I paid serious money for my ad to show up every time someone searched for ‘music’ I’d want an explanation.
