The Next Web

Google cannibalizing their assets? Isn’t it a bit early for that?

By Boris
December 2, 2008
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Google cannibalizing their assets? Isnt it a bit early for that?Google’s new Browser Chrome hasn’t been making much of a dent in the browser markets yet. And they don’t have to to. Google seems patient and will slowly but decidedly keep working on their product until it starts gaining momentum. This is a market they want, and should, be in. Read this great background article at Wired for some insights into their plans and history.

a few months ago we visited an Internet start-up where the CEO told us a funny story of how one of his developers used an Ad Blocker. He took the developer aside and explained to him that their whole business, his company and his salary depended on income on ads. He explained to the developer that if he wanted to work in this business it would be odd to fight the economic systems that pay for your food. The developer ended up removing the ad blocker.

The reason I’m telling you now is that Google, a company that depends on ads for 95% of its revenue, is now inviting developers to come up with an ad blocker for Chrome. Really.

Listed in the Chromium Developer Documentation are several references to an ‘AdBlocker’. Is is part of “some types of extensions that we’d like to eventually support” in Chrome, according to the document. Now I know the principles behind innovation and cannibalizing your assets but I’m still surprised that Google would invite people to build one for Chrome.

What happens if the feature becomes the number one Chrome add-on, and Chrome becomes the number one browser on the web? A web without ads? Does Google secretly think that ads are just a temporary way to make money until they can start charging for their products? Or is this just a product of a developer who wrote a technical document and published it without checking with PR or Management?


  • I think Google would'nt be screwing themselves with this ad blocker,even with the current ad blocker plugins for Firefox, ads are still appearing on the search results. What could happen is maybe soon they might have the google ads appearing through auto suggestion as you type in the url address bar, which in turns making the ads appear natural to the users.
  • maybe they make it only block non google ads :p

    I never saw the point in ad blocking, the days of annoying pop ups are almost gone and I think we can live with seeing ads.
  • He he he, that is a good one. :-)
  • Well so You have not visited polish webpages. In this internet region flash top layers are still very common.

    And why Chrome has to have AdBlock? It won't gain market share without. Or rather without plugins, and where are plugins there AdBlock will be.

    BTW - AdBlock does not 'magically' removes advertising from webpages. You can apply some filters based on URLs.

    I do use AdBlock - when on any site I encounter annoying ad I consider 'leave and not return' policy :) or just add those ads to AdBlock if I can not live without site :)

    So maybe AdBlock is one of reasons that popups and top layers are in decline?
  • if you own a market like Google does, your most important consideration is the market's health. You don't care about loosing 1% here, or winning 1% there. Many advertisers cheat by selling ads on a cpm basis that are not worth anything. If you do so, in long term you are in danger of generating a lemon market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons) where prices may fall bottomless. Google needs to fight that by injecting trust and transparency into the market. They have stressed relevancy as a major issue in advertising for some time now. They don't sell ads to the highest bidder, but instead they count in quality and other factors just to make sure that ads stay relevant and meaningful. This is totally in-line with saying: if you don't want ads at all, ok, you don't need to. You may call it an opt-out if you want.
  • The people that install Ad blockers won't click an ad anyway.
  • Shaun
    If the ad blocker just blocks flash then I'd be happy still viewing Google text ads.
  • Yeah, it did talk about that in the specifications...
  • AdBlock and the like block Flash ads. Google makes its money from paid-search text ads on its own site. They are in effect *stronger* for having those other ads blocked, not weaker. This isn't cannibalization, its market consolidation.
  • Toby is right. The annoying ads are the flash ones on non flash pages. And they are getting worse- obscuring the whole page. Google's flash ads in youtube vids- which require you to unblock.
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