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.