by One Good Bumblebee
From the Seattle Times today (read in print version) comes a story headlined: “Google Says It Will Challenge Amazon On Electronic Books.” Loyal readers of mine would have known this was coming 7 months ago. Here are a few choice excerpts from my old post:
“Why Google is likely to come into conflict with the mega-retailers like Amazon and eBay[…]”
“In turn, the margins for internet retailers will become thinner as Google progressively steals marketshare and people just use Google as their default product search. Call it Froogle 2.0.”
Actually, it appears from the Seattle Times story that I was wrong on the margins point, because Google will allow publishers to set their own retail price, while apparently Amazon is already selling e-books at a slight loss. Presumably, Google will take a commission on each sale. But Google is trying to steal market share…
This fits in with what I was saying about Google’s affiliate network and how they are going to become the biggest affiliate around in the next little while.
“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products. […] Once this happens, Google becomes the largest affiliate worldwide.”
Replace Google Base with Google Books – whose rapid rise to prominence I noted at SEO Book – and you get today’s announcement [Ed: It actually was in Monday’s paper, but I didn’t have time to edit this post].
This isn’t the first time I’ve been ahead of the mainstream seo community.
Longtime readers will recall how, I picked up on Google’s new submarine crawling, 4 months before the announcement that they were querying site search forms.
Others will remember my presentation of how to use trusts to buy sites at SMX Advanced last year – which also came months after I shared the technique on this blog…
And my SMX Advanced presentation was based partly on a year-old post! Yet people loved it…
So if you want to stay ahead of the pack and have a competitive advantage, you should add my rss feed to your reader.
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