How and Why I Blog

Posted on 6 March 2010 | 7:18 am

Steve Ballmer and the Future of Search Revenues

This is today's Search Insider Column

Steve Ballmer is an enthusiastic guy. As he climbed on stage with Danny Sullivan at SMX West, everyone was wondering how long it would be before he cranked up the volume and slipped into his typical Ballmeresque bombastic delivery. Steve didn’t disappoint. A few minutes into the interview, with Sullivan probing about Microsoft’s aspirations around search, Ballmer was yelling “Sell..Danny, Don’t Yell!” (ironic in the extreme) and roughhousing with poor Danny like a good natured football coach having a little fun with the class math geek. I half expected Steve to give Sullivan a noogie.

Search as it exists today proved to be the perfect crystallization of a revenue model, a beautifully simple evolution that had all the right pieces falling into place at just the right time. It was a rare occurrence in the messy and organic online world, one that Google capitalized on to the tune of several billion dollars. But it’s unrealistic to think that this crystallization of revenue opportunity can survive for long or morph into something equally universal, simple and effective.

Here’s what happened: Search solved a fundamental human need – the need to access information. Google did search better than anyone else. All this searching happened in a small handful of places, with Google as the dominant destination. Much of this searching was for information that came from consumer intent.  And, because consumers were searching for information, sponsored messages could be informational in tone rather than overtly promotional. Search was a “click”, the natural and simple connection of burgeoning need with marketing opportunity.

But here is what’s happening: Search is not as simple as it was. Increasingly, our search activity is splintering over more platforms and through more interface layers. Search is going “under the hood”, powering a number of different apps for a number of different needs. This means the ubiquitous and universal intersection point for search is going away. We’re demanding more from search – more functionality, more integration, more understanding of how we intend to use the information we seek. This raising of the bar of our expectations means that it will become increasingly difficult for one interface to serve all those needs.

As we start doing more online, finding the functionality we need to take us not just from point A to B, but allowing us to continue on to C, D and even Z, with digital servants assisting with, or even allowing us to completely ignore, the interim steps, search which just be another piece of that functionality. This “usefulness” explosion is very unlikely to happen in one place. It will happen in thousands or millions of places. And search will be relegated from being an online destination to an online utility. Google, and Microsoft, and any other search provider, will lose the critical revenue producing high ground, the touch point with the consumer, at least in the form it currently exists. This will require a rapid shift in revenue models, and I suspect it’s this impending shift that Ballmer was alluding to in his keynote. There will be revenue to be made, far more revenue in fact. But Google and Microsoft may find themselves in the position of taking a much smaller slice of a much larger pie.

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