Australian Publishers All Bark & No Bite Over Google’s Real Estate Plans
This will make you chuckle:
Fairfax Media and News Ltd are independently weighing up whether to pull the millions of dollars they collectively spend on buying key search terms on Google following the latter’s decision to list properties for sale on Google Maps.
So, two publishers in Australia are threatening to pull the "millions of dollars" they spend on Google AdWords as a means of protest for Google’s launch of competing real estate listings.
At first glance, you may think to yourself. "Well, Google will sit up and take notice now!" After all, Google doesn’t want to lose any significant revenue, right?
Wrong!
You see, Google earns over $5 billion (with a "b") in revenue EACH QUARTER! The loss of a few million is not going to do much to dissuade the search giant from launching a service that could potentially add hundreds of millions to the bottom line.
Additionally, who stands to lose the most here?
The guys behind Fairfax and News Ltd’s media buy are savvy folks–they’re not just wasting those millions of dollars. Clearly they’re spending that amount of money because they’re seeing a good ROI. Hitwise indicates that these two companies receive as much as a third of their traffic from Google! That’s a lot of traffic to lose! Even eBay couldn’t go cold turkey on Google for more than one week.
Nope, this is nothing more than a chance to get some media attention–easy to do when you publish the newspaper that’s doing the reporting! 
