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Comment by thailandstartup | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there would be a way to split Google up into multiple companies to deal with the (multiple) conflicts of interest it has viz-a-viz providing both search and buying/selling advertising. I doubt it would be good for Google stock holders, but good for the market in general.

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If you did that, how would the search company make money, if it's not involved with advertising?

My knee-jerk response is licensing the search and analysis technology back to the ad company. Abstractly, not necessarily a terrible idea, other ad networks could compete using the same base search tech, and the GoogleAds could switch engines or merge the opinions of more than one. Concretely I imagine it would take the respective halfs of the company a number of years to actually detach their tech stacks from each other enough that a switch would be practical, let alone cost effective.

I imagine they'd still make their revenue from advertising - they'd have an adsense bar. This would put the search part of the business on the same footing as other sites selling advertising space.

I'm imagining a world where there are multiple adsenses (ad brokers) competing effectively with each other for space, driving out supernormal profit for brokers, and returning the bulk of the advertising revenues to the publishers rather than to the middleman (currently Google). With more revenue for the publishers, more publishers come online and drive out supernormal profits for publisher too. That would be a more efficient market.

Sound like CPM...or tv advertising.

With more revenue for the publishers, more publishers come online and drive out supernormal profits for publisher too.

We've been seeing that for a long time...In the mid 90s porn affiliate stuff would pay tens of dollars per click, from banners!

*By "publishers", you mean people that make websites with content that have ads.

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