The Dangers of Google's Market Dominance

Interesting article by Paul McIntyre in the SMH, October 18, 2007.

Paul notes that Australians have been warned that their unwavering loyalty to Google as their default search engine risks triggering huge price rises for paid search advertising, a trend that has forced some advertisers in Britain out this advertising mode.

According to Paul, an estimated 40 per cent of the $1 billion Australian internet advertising sector is spent on paid search. He quotes the warning of John Tawadros, the worldwide chief operating officer of the search engine marketing group iProspect, that Google's market dominance meant prices could only escalate in Australia.

In the US, Google North America controls 62 per cent of all search requests, followed by Yahoo! with 25 per cent and MSN on 4 per cent. In Australia, google.com.au has 72 per cent, google.com has another 17 per cent, 89 per cent in all. Yahoo and MSN in Australia account for 4 per cent each of Australian search requests.

The increasing cost trend to paid listings has encouraged many companies to focus on organic search, a form of search familiar to all bloggers. After all, we do monitor where our traffic comes from!

I cannot see paid listings disappearing. The market place corrects. In this context, I have noticed a downward trend in the Ad Sense per click values across a number a number of sites that I monitor.