bgmacaw

From: FT.com / In depth - Google falls short of expectations courtesy of Drudge

So it looks like they might have shot themselves in the foot with the wholesale banning of MFA sites. And, it shows what was obvious all along, that arbi and MFA sites made Google a lot of money.

Aveligand

I'm sure the MFA crackdown has caused google to lose a bit of revenue, but I doubt Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or Sergey Brin are losing any sleep over it.

Google has always been manically focused on delivering "quality" search results to the users because they understand that their most important asset is their pristine, squeeky-clean "don't be evil" brand image. The moment users start getting crappy search results or pissed at Google is the moment it starts failing as a company. In that sense, not clamping down on MFA sites could cause them to loose a lot more money in the long run. So if you rationalize it that way, they're not really shooting themselves in the foot.

Drake

Ya I think shooting themselves in the foot is strong. They just dont want to be partners with a bunch of arbitrage sites. Both make money but not their deal.

They will figure out how to do it themselves or do it with someone big so they can control it a bit more.

krazyjosh5

arbi is just exploiting the profit margin of Google. they sell ads high and buy ads low. if they want to continue with such a high margin business where customers are on both ends of the equation (buy/sell) they can expect that there will ALWAYS be someone around to exploit that. they can make it difficult with algorithm but thats just wack a mole til you find something that works.