People who use Google are Valuable

Megan McArdle doesn’t

have a lot of faith in those of us who Google. People who arrive at a website

from Google, she says, are "low quality" in terms of their value to

advertisers:

As far as advertisers are concerned, most google searchers are closer to

the guy who picks up the Pennysaver, than to someone you’d deliberately buy

an ad to reach.

I simply don’t understand this. Does Megan think that advertisers discount

the amount of money they’re willing to pay for an ad on a website by the percentage

of that website’s readers who come from Google? Of course not. On the internet,

readers are readers, and if readers of businessweek.com are worth more to advertisers

than readers of time.com, that isn’t changed if people start arriving at businessweek.com

via Google rather than via a bookmark in their web browser.

Indeed, I’d hazard that ceteris paribus, Google searchers are more

valuable than the average internet reader. Websites such as aol.com and usatoday.com

still get a lot of traffic mainly because their readers don’t use Google.

On the other hand, if I want news and analysis on some esoteric topic and type

"modified duration of investment-grade syndicated loans" into Google,

I’ll end up at the Journal of Banking and Finance, where I’m sure their advertisers

are very happy to see me.

Indeed, the use of Google to find news and analysis online demonstrates engagement

on two different levels, both of which are still less common online than you

might think. Remember that the most popular news source in the US is TV: you

turn it on, you sit back, and you’re told what you ought to know. Second to

TV is newspapers: you pick them up, you sit back, but then you start actively

picking and choosing the stories you want to read and ignoring the stories you

don’t want to read. And websites like usatoday.com and aol.com work that way

too. They give their readers a choice of headlines which can then be clicked

on and read. Someone using Google, by contrast, already knows what

they’re interested in, and is actively seeking out information on that news

topic. They’re informed, and engaged, and invested in finding things out.

The other level is that someone using Google has faith in their own abilities

to discern quality from junk. They might just use URLs on the Google results

page as a first-level filter, and find themselves more likely to read something

on wsj.com than something on blogspot.com. Alternatively, they might read what

looks to be most germane and interesting, and judge the content on its own merits.

Either way, they’re again showing active informed engagement in the news gathering

and reading process. These are the people that advertisers want!

Megan thinks that the WSJ can charge higher ad rates precisely because

its readers pay money to read its content. I doubt it. Maybe she should ask

her old bosses at economist.com whether ad rates there have come down since

the content became free. Somehow I doubt it.

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