Google
Plus, the company's social network, is like a ghost town. Want to see
your old roommate's baby or post your vacation status? Chances are,
you'll use Facebook instead.
But Google isn't
worried. Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a
social network, but it is central to Google's future - a lens that
allows the company to peer more broadly into people's digital life and
to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information advertisers
covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about
people's social activity than Facebook does.
The
reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for
all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who
you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once
return to the social network itself. Before Google released Plus, the
company might not have known that you were the same person when you
searched, watched videos and used maps. With a single Plus account, the
company can build a database of your affinities. Google says Plus has
540 million monthly active users, but almost half do not visit the
social network.
"Google Plus gives you the
opportunity to be yourself and gives Google that common understanding of
who you are," said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product
management for Google Plus.
Plus is now so
important to Google that the company requires people to sign up to use
some Google services, like commenting on YouTube. The push is being done
so forcefully that it has alienated some users and raised privacy and
antitrust concerns, including at the Federal Trade Commission. Larry
Page, Google's chief executive, tied employee bonuses companywide to its
success and appointed Vic Gundotra, a senior Google executive, to lead
it.
The value of Plus has only increased in the
past year, as search advertising, Google's main source of profits, has
slowed. At the same time, advertising based on the kind of information
gleaned from what people talk about, do and share online, rather than
simply what they search for, has become more important.
Brand
advertisers already target ads based on assumptions about broad
categories, like women who watch sports. But the ads can be even more
targeted when Web companies know more about their users - say, that a
particular female soccer fan is also a mother who likes thrillers and
wants to buy a home.
"The database of affinity
could be the holy grail for more effective brand advertising," said Nate
Elliott, an analyst at Forrester studying social media and marketing.
Google
says the information it gains about people through Google Plus helps it
create better products - like sending traffic updates to cellphones or
knowing whether a search for "Hillary" refers to a family member or to
the former secretary of state - as well as better ads.
"It's
about you showing up at Google and having a consistent experience
across products so they feel like one product, and that makes your
experiences with every Google product better," Horowitz said.
Thanks
to Plus, Google knows about people's friendships on Gmail, the places
they go on maps and how they spend their time on the more than 2 million
websites in Google's ad network. And it is gathering this information
even though relatively few people use Plus as their social network. Plus
has 29 million unique monthly users on its website and 41 million on
smartphones, with some users overlapping, compared with Facebook's 128
million users on its website and 108 million on phones, according to
Nielsen.
The company has also pushed brands to
join Plus, offering a powerful incentive in exchange - prime placement
on the right-hand side of search results, with photos and promotional
posts.
"It is literally promotion that money
can't buy," Elliott said. "It is something that Google could make
billions off of if they sell that space tomorrow, and they're giving it
away to try to get people onto the social platform."
Starbucks,
for instance, has 3 million followers on Plus, meager compared with its
36 million "likes" on Facebook. Yet it updates its Google Plus page for
the sake of good search placement and in doing so uses tutoring from
Google representatives on how to optimize Plus content for the search
engine.
"When we think about posting on Google
Plus, we think about how does it relate to our search efforts," said
Alex Wheeler, vice president of global digital marketing at Starbucks.
The
Economist has more fans on Google Plus than on Facebook - 6 million
versus 3 million - and its journalists use Plus features like Hangouts.
Yet Chandra Magee, The Economist's senior director of audience
development, emphasized the value of Plus as a search engine
optimization tool.
"There is potential there to
help us get in front of new audiences," she said. "But it also helps
with our SEO strategy because our posts on Google Plus actually show up
in our search engine results."
The way Google
is tying its search engine, which dominates the market, with a less
popular product in Plus has set off antitrust concerns. The Federal
Trade Commission raised the issue during its recent antitrust
investigation of Google, according to two people briefed on the matter.
That investigation closed without a finding of wrongdoing.
"If
you want Google search, they're going to shove Google Plus at you
pretty hard, so the consumer's forced to take the product they don't
want to get the product they want," said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia
Law School who studies antitrust law and the Internet.
"That
raises big questions under antitrust law," he said. "It reminds me a
little bit of Microsoft when Microsoft was fearing Netscape and decided
to bend over backward and do anything possible to tie Explorer to their
operating system."
Google declined to comment on this issue.
Some
Google users have been turned off by the push to sign up for Plus.
Melissa Bright, a business analyst in Houston, stopped using some
products because she did not want to join.
"It just seems really intrusive and easy to accidentally find yourself sent to it at every turn," she said.
After
YouTube began requiring a membership to comment on YouTube videos, a
founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, deleted much of his account. And
YouTube's most popular video creator, who goes by the username
PewDiePie, temporarily shut off comments on his videos.
Commenting
on consumers' reactions to Google Plus integrations, Horowitz of Google
said, "We are attuned both to what people say and to what people do."
And despite what some vocal users have said, few have fled - a sign, perhaps, of Google's sheer strength on the web.
"If people want to use your platform enough," Elliott said, "you can get away with quite a lot."
Asphalt 8: Airborne
Blade Slinger
UK
accountants are turning to cloud technology in their droves. According
to a recent Censuswide poll, the biggest motivating factors include the
opportunity to cut internal overheads such as travel and data input
costs, improve service and increase client satisfaction.
The
twelve days of Christmas may have come and gone, but the weather
outside remains frightful. Even by British standards, 2014 has been a
wet one so far.
Companies
are always under threat from a security point of view and with networks
becoming bigger, faster and more complex, security threats and
violations are becoming harder to detect and difficult to stop.
