Google - Invasion Of The Ad Snatchers?

Google's adwords and adsense pay per click juggernauts appear to be sucking the life out of old media says stock watcher Henry Blodget, author of the Silicon Alley Insider technology stock blog.

Blodget noted that online advertising is flowing online at a "frantic" rate, and Google captured twice as much of the new revenue as its closest three competitors combined.

Where offline advertising increased by about a billion from 2006 to 2007, online ad spending increased 4 billion with Google scooping up a whopping $2.7 billion of that $4 billion increased spend. As Blodget notes about a third of Google's revenues are from its relationships with publishers who use Adsense to run Google ads on their own properties, so some of that 2.7 billion is shared with the tens of thousands of large and small publishers in Google's advertising stable.

Google's powerful dominance in the online advertising space will be enhanced with the DoubleClick acquistion, although it remains to be seen if Google can monetize display advertising as successfully as it has monetized per click advertising -in many ways revolutionizing the industry with the success of the pay per click model. Ironically Google was not the inventor of this pay per click model that is rapidly making Google the most successful technology company in history.

Most credit the invention of the pay per click ad to Bill Gross and his startup GoTo.com which was soon renamed to Overture.com in a Disney trademark dispute and then Overture was acquired by Yahoo.