Ben Edelman, a Harvard Business School professor, investigates online advertising practices, affiliate fraud, and Google's competitive conduct.
Commenters cite his reports on booking platform bias and Google's search behavior as sources in antitrust discussions, and as evidence about shady ad software.
After Wikia Search failed, there's no risk in Google further subsidizing the growth of Wikipedia so long as Google then gets to scrape back much of the value add via their knowledge graph & Wikia is primarily monetized via Google AdSense.
It makes sense Wikimedia didn't see an immediate donation drop. In terms of a conversion funnel, the people who are using Wikipedia for the first time are not likely to donate. My guess is most of the people who are most likely to donate a small amount here or there are the regular users who regularly seek out the site. The drop in donations due to the lower exposure would take years to kick in, because now with 20% or 30% fewer users, there will also be less new future power users who would donate in say 2018 or 2019. But offsetting any decline there for a company making over a billion a month in profits shouldn't be too substantial. Sergey Brin donates a half-million a year grant to the Wikimedia foundation & Google has also donated a few million.
It is also worth mentioning the knowledge graph now often contains affiliate links for things like music, ebooks, and so on. Over time more and more knowledge categories will have paid affiliate links in them (say booking a restaurant, heading to a concert, etc.)
In some cases Google may temporarily make a link type free to try to drive adoption and awareness, but over time it will be the same sort of scrape-n-displace they've done with hotel bookings. They not only turned the "organic" hotel…
Google has confidential "Mobile Application Distribution agreements" that guarantees google services and functionality and stipulates requirements.. Luckily court cases have revealed the stipulations that show Android is anything but "Free" to handset makers.. http://www.benedelman.org/docs/htc-mada.pdf
unfortunately i can't find any cases that show how much of the estimated ~60 dollars per handset is licensing costs for the google apps (as some have been licensed to mfrs) or patent / indemnification agreements needed that google doesn't offer but still are a cost to selling android handsets.
I know google makes a LOT more money on ads.. but lets be real, while android was open source its current incarnation is nowhere to be found and his hidden behind represive agrements, advertising, and marketing and android phones in the end are no cheaper than any other phone price wise..
When i buy a surface/tablet/oem pc it just comes with windows.. When i build a PC i buy an OEM license for 30 bucks.. if you know the platform you're running you can know how to save cash and make the best of it.
>>when they explicitly say AOSP, they make it sound like is a minor part, not enough to run an actual phone (which, for being any useful, requires google apps, is their thesis I guess)
It is 2014. Modern phones need to do more than just make phone calls.
Mobile app developers want to build with the best APIs available. Location, in-app advertising & search features are best when they use the api's associated with google's custom services.
The hair you're trying to split misses the point about modern mobile apps & modern smart phones. Google is clearly using API compatibility as a wedge against the OEMs.
Samsung's Taizen project wouldn't exist if this pressure was not a real problem. Google is behaving like mid-90's microsoft. This deeper link paints a bleak picture of what's going on:
http://www.benedelman.org/news/021314-1.html
From the wiki page on TrustArc:
"In January 2006, Harvard economics researcher Benjamin Edelman published a study showing that sites with TRUSTe certification were 50 percent more likely to violate privacy policies than uncertified sites:
https://www.benedelman.org/news-092506/
And perhaps ironically (if honestly true - maybe it never was the intention), TrustArc was nominally/purportedly started to promote privacy at TrustE. A lie perhaps.
"TrustArc, was founded as a non-profit industry association called TRUSTe in 1997 by Lori Fena, then executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Charles Jennings, a software entrepreneur, with the mission of fostering online commerce by helping businesses and other online organizations self-regulate privacy concerns."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrustArc
This isn't accurate. Google's search ad auction started as a generalized second-price (GSP) auction[1][2], which is not the same as VCG. In particular, GSP is not truthful, while VCG is.
The display ads auction (formerly DoubleClick Ad Exchange, now Google Ad Manager) has always been separate, and it used to use an Optional Second Price (OSP) auction[1]. It's transitioning to a first-price auction for the reasons mentioned in the blog post you linked to. As stated in the blog post: "This change will have no impact on auctions for ads on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_second-price_auction
[2] https://www.benedelman.org/publications/gsp-060801.pdf
[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.0535.pdf
I can sympathize with Nextag on the topic of Google entering their market and possibly being a little less than objective regarding their own product (Benjamin Edelman has written about this several times: http://www.benedelman.org/).
On the other hand, getting 60% traffic from Google is very unhealthy (18 mil. of 30 mil. monthly users?) and doesn't make Nextag look like a site people stick to because of its quality. None of the sites I visit daily (directly) has anywhere near that much search traffic (according to Alexa), so perhaps Nextag hits are perceived by searchers as "generic", interchangeable results that happen to rank well on Google and they don't care much whether the hits are from Nextag, Google Shopping or any other e-commerce site.