To be honest, I fail to understand why Google needs to do this. Chrome is gaining market-share at a very high pace already. Are they targeting a specific group of people in this case, or is this some misdirected effort by a third party advertiser?
For every mom-blogger, there are a couple of hundred readers. Just think about it and do the economics: For $40 you get a sponsored post, which gets read by a couple of hundred women. Higher ROI than TV campaigns..!!
This Google Chrome advertising campaign, or the sponsored post campaign, is executed fairly poor. You can expect Google to defend their actions by blaming the marketing company, firing them, and apologizing.
If these were sponsored results for JCPenny, for instance, it is very unlikely anyone would think they were seriously trying to gain market share directly -- it would be fairly obvious they were trying to game search results. However, since it's google themselves, I don't know what on earth someone was thinking.
According to the guidelines Google advocates, any form of endorsements should be notified in the post and have a no-follow attribute on the link when there is money involved.
The majority of mom-bloggers are familiar with the rules around give aways, paid endorsements and advertising. They know how to run a business. It's a pity that the bloggers who have been featured in this campaign will take the flak, as Google brings down the hammer. Some of the bloggers don't know any better, and take an easy opportunity to monetize their websites.
And who can blame them, It's Google! If a campaign is from Google, with a mantra: Don't be evil, it can only be a good thing to do this, right..?
Google has a responsibility here, not only to choose the right advertising consultant, but also to educate the bloggers on how their websites will be treated given their war on paid links and endorsements.
Doing a lot more damage to IE would be good for everyone. Microsoft moves way to slowly and they keep dropping support for older OS's, and they refuse to support WebGL, for example.
IE10, while actually looking impressive, won't run on Vista. XP will have significant market share for at least another 5 years and it's limited to IE8.
In short, I'd like to see Firefox, Chrome, and Opera take another 30% away from Microsoft.
[Updated]
Clearly my comments aren't appreciated. Look at this chart.
To put it bluntly, Microsoft isn't getting the sh*t kicked out of them fast enough. Post PC, the death spiral of IE, no one buying WinMo7. Sorry guys, some of us have waited a long time for this. :-)
Gee, I wonder why they move so slowly. Do you think it could have something to do with trying to support so many old OS's?
I mean, really. Your cake. You can't have it and eat it.
IE6 - 2001
IE7 - 2006
IE8 - 2009
IE9 - 2011
IE10 - 2012
They are picking up the pace because there's so much competition. Unfortunately, it's not quick enough.
No, because they were jingoistic and myopic. IE9 is a decent browser (by all measures superior to Firefox) and IE10 looks to be better. Your blind platform hatred is showing.
That's an opinion, not fact. I'd appreciate if you explain why you think so.
http://html5test.com/results.html
Google Chrome 16.0 => 373
Mozilla Firefox 9.0 => 330
Opera 11.60 329 => 9
Apple Safari 5.1 => 302
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 => 141