Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

IN SPITE OF GOOGLE’S RAPID GROWTH, or because of it, by 2007 the company had become a target for lawsuits and sneers. Leading the chorus was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. In 2007, he had labeled Google “a one-trick pony,” and had derided the company at nearly every public opportunity since, telling reporters, “they have one product that makes all their money, and it hasn’t changed in five years… Search makes ninety-eight percent of all their money.” Irwin Gotlieb, who is not in Ballmer’s adversarial camp, nevertheless shared the view that Google’s attempt to broaden its reach had been a failure. “Google is extremely good with search,” he said. “They are good with AdSense. They are not as good with display advertising. I believe they’ve lost a fortune on selling radio ads, they’ve lost a fortune on selling print ads, and they are now losing a fortune on selling television ads.” Tad Smith, the CEO of Reed Business Information, which produces eighty publications and Web sites, asked, “Where is the new pony? Apple came up with a new pony, the iPod and iPhone. Microsoft came up with Office. Google is throwing a lot of things against the wall, and so far only one has stuck to the wall. And Google’s search growth will slow.”

Eric Schmidt had a ready rejoinder to Ballmer: “I like the trick!” And justifiably so: the trick yielded more than sixteen billion dollars in revenues and four billion dollars in profit in 2007. Schmidt went on, “The Google model is one-trick to the extent that you believe targeted advertising is one-trick.” Google now had about 150 products available, and he believed the other efforts-You Tube; DoubleClick; mobile phone products; cloud computing; selling TV, radio, and newspaper ads-could sell targeted advertising. Yet with almost all of its revenues pumping from only one of 150 wells, the question-can Google find another gusher?-was “a legitimate question,” as top Google executives like Elliot Schrage conceded at the time.

At the start of 2008 there was evidence that the gusher was tapering off. Search advertising was slowing. In January and February, comScore, a research firm that tracks online activity, reported that Google searchers were clicking on fewer text ads. Wall Street analysts predicted Google’s revenue rise would stall, and the stock price dropped; from its pinnacle of $742 on November 6, 2007, it had plunged 40 percent by March 2008. The press, lusting for a new narrative, fixed on this one: the Google rocket was crashing. “Goodbye, Google,” read the headline in Forbes.com. Reporters buzzed, incessantly, about dire days ahead. Google was spinning them, they believed, when people like Tim Armstrong explained that the company was trying to make the ads “more relevant” and had deliberately reduced the number of ads appearing with search results to reduce clutter and produce better information. Google said clicks without purchases meant the ads were not useful to the user, so they were eliminated. Reporters were deeply skeptical when chief economist Hal Varian in early 2008 cautioned, “The clicks are not what is relevant. The revenue is.”

But events would demonstrate that the press and Wall Street analysts are often handicapped by two imperatives: don’t be late with bad news, and don’t be the lone blackbird left on the pole. In April 2008, when the company released its first-quarter results, the narrative changed. Google’s revenues had surged 42 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007; its profits had jumped 30 percent, and as Varian had suggested, its ad clicks had risen 20 percent. “Google Inc’s Go-Go Era Apparently Isn’t Over,” said a report in the Wall Street Journal. The Times headline was: “Google Defies the Economy and Reports a Profit Surge.” As the report showed, Google hogged three quarters of all U.S. search advertising dollars, compared to only 5 percent for Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft.

Yet Ballmer had a point. Google had not figured out how to make money on its surfeit of products. YouTube accounted for one of every three videos viewed online, three billion of the nine billion viewed in January 2008. The impact of this new medium would forever change the way politics are conducted. Seven of the sixteen candidates who ran for president in 2008 announced their candidacies on YouTube, and more people saw a taped version of the July 2007 Democratic presidential debate there than live on CNN. YouTube succeeded in democratizing information. It became a viral hub where a candidate’s flubs or fibs were exposed by a video. When Mitt Romney became a born-again crusader against abortion, videos were posted of the former governor of Massachusetts championing a woman’s right to an abortion. Overseas, when Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez shut down El Observador, an opposition newspaper, it began broadcasting on YouTube.

However, YouTube made no money. Its bandwidth and computer costs were steep, and it paid for some of its content. Three senior Google executives with knowledge of these figures said at the time that YouTube would lose money in 2008, and these losses would grow in 2009, with revenues initially projected at about $250 million and losses totaling about $500 million. There were those, like Gotlieb, who believed “they’ll never make money on YouTube.” He thought online display ads would annoy viewers, and that most advertisers sought predictably ad-friendly settings for their ads, something a site dominated by user-generated content could not ensure. Like many Valley start-up founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen believed, as Google’s did when they launched, that if they first built traffic, money would follow. By February 2008, Schmidt said he had summoned teams from YouTube and Google to “start working on monetizing it.”

“You didn’t tell us to work on it,” a surprised Hurley said, recalled Schmidt.

“Well, times have changed,” said Schmidt.

Schmidt was not unhappy with YouTube or its founders. He believed YouTube was becoming nearly as ubiquitous a Web activity as e-mail. But Schmidt wanted a business plan; he announced that his “highest priority” in 2008 was to figure out a way for YouTube “to make money.” He knew that online video ads had to be different from television ads. Ads that appeared before a video started would be annoying. Internet users wanted to see the video as soon as they clicked on it. Thirty-second ads anywhere in an online setting were too long. The ads couldn’t feel like an interruption, certainly not a long interruption. Schmidt’s joint teams came up with several novel advertising schemes. Schmidt said he didn’t know if they’d work, but “if any of them hit, it is a billion-dollar business. Of course, it’s now zero.” To minimize insecurity at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, he dispatched Coach Campbell to visit regularly and to calm the troops and help coax a monetization plan.

There was another potential cash cow to pursue. In 2007, Google began to aggressively move to claim a slice of the mobile phone business, which then counted three billion users worldwide-three times the PC market-a number Schmidt expected to grow by another billion in four years. The success of Apple’s revolutionary iPhone, with its easy access to the Internet, was an eye-opener: the iPhone delivered fifty times more search queries, Google found, than the typical so-called smartphone. A mobile device was no longer just a telephone or a PDA, and portable access to the Internet advanced Google’s interests; the more people went online, the more Google benefited.

But Google was frustrated that many of its programs functioned poorly on mobile phones. They were frustrated that telephone companies, not consumers, decided which applications would appear on their mobile phones. “As compared to the Internet model, where we’ve been able to make software that basically is able to run everything and works for people pretty well, it’s been very difficult to do that on phones,” Page said. Google’s mobile quarterback was Andy Rubin. A former Microsoft employee, Rubin had left to cofound a mobile software company called Android, which Google had acquired in 2005. As the senior director of mobile platforms for Google, Rubin set out to make Android an open-source operating system-open to improvements from any software designer because the source code was visible, not proprietary, and peers could collaborate to offer and improve different software applications. This was a direct assault on the telephone companies, which policed what software applications could be displayed for consumers.