Then there’s the second Horseman of Apocalypse: Apple. The deals MS and Apple are inking, and likely to pen down in the future, are bound to put a hole in the Googly mothership. Does this mean Google is going away? Not anytime soon. Google is freaking huge.

One thing to understand about public company financing is that the amount of money you have to fund your business has a lot to do with your stock price, and your stock price is tied to what the market believes your stock will be worth in the future – not now. The companies that are better managed from a financial standpoint – maximizing what they do with the money they have available – are the ones that succeed. When the market believes you won’t deliver on the earnings goals of the future, it means the returns on the stock won’t be there and thus your stock is not worth as much as the investor thought when they bought it, so they may sell it before other folks find out you’re not going to make your numbers, which cascades in share sales at ever-lower prices down to the point where the market expects you will be. In a sense, the market corrects itself for its over-valuation of the company. The problem for a publicly-traded company is that a drop in stock price is like someone going into their bank account and literally taking money out and throwing it away; it causes the company to have less funds to fund its operations, which in turn causes it to miss its targets. Its not a death spiral, but you get the picture of how companies can crash to the ground.

The tech industry is a place where disruptive models and tech cause things to literally vanish overnight. Anyone remember when Altavista was hot shit?

What goes around… Comes around…

I wonder who will be the Third Horseman of Apocalypse in this story.

Post Sparked by Shoemoney’s post titled: “Is Google’s One Trick Pony About To Be Euthanized by Microsoft“

Some points to ponder:

• Jeremy Schoemaker started humbly and slowly learning the ropes and succeeded while maintaining his integrity and honesty in a field where its pretty much a big medieval melee.

• He built a brand around his name.

• He is putting the brand behind a very public offering of a training, the Shoemoney System. Would you put your last name and a picture of your face to something you have even a shadow of a doubt might end up flopping? Lets say you might – lets say you think in a very shortsighted way and believe that this “one shot” might be enough to screw everyone over and take a permanent Caribbean vacation; and lets say you can’t imagine why anyone would do differently. Then the reason Jeremy is not thinking the way you are is because he is kinda dumb (at least in your book) and has been showing he is kinda slow for a few years now – He has put his name behind dozens of things and none of them flopped and he hasn’t moved to Bermuda just yet – Being dumb is not something that goes away overnight, so this latest thing he is doing is probably another one of those things that actually delivers on its promise.

If that’s not enough endorsement, how’s this for an endorsement: I convinced my mom to sign up. Yes, I did and its not a joke. I signed up myself and had already talked to my mother about it at length. Endorsements don’t get much better than stuff you talk your own mother into.

Head on over to the Shoemoney System sign-up page and see if there are some spots left.

Premise: We judge the health and authority of a site in relationship to the advertising (or lack of) it carries.

If you went to a corporate website – such as Microsoft.com or Apple.com – and bumped into a slew of banner ads for products from other companies, what would you think? That you went to the wrong site? That they’re not doing so well that they need ads? That’s a pretty straightforward example – you’re expecting a major player and they’re peppering your screen with semi-related offers.

Here is where it gets interesting. If the site has low authority in a field – like a personal blog (ahem), adding a limited number of ads in the right places sends a completely different message – to some it will lend the credibility that comes with a publisher that cares about their blog enough to try to monetize it. You expect the site to potentially be a source of income for the publisher, regardless if it is just an online doodle. To everyone else, regardless of knowledge or experience, there is an association of ideas that takes, and the concepts associated to the ads become related to the blog in the visitor’s mind – its a matter of degrees, of course.

Ad quality transfers to site experience

If the ads on a site are of good quality, it can ad a veneer of credibility/authority to the site regardless of its content. As an example, this site is currently displaying ads for a Web 2.0 application development platform, and some brick-and-mortar universities. This is as close as the blog is going to get in terms of getting associated with such powerful brands – If I have a big ad for Harvard university, some ideas you have associated with that institution are transferred to the experience you receive from my site. If I have the Harvard site everywhere, the more you visit my blog the more the idea of my blog will be related to the concepts you hold with the Harvard logo. Now imagine if my ads were for something shady, like get-rich-quick schemes or using bad logos – like the Enron logo.

This cuts both ways – The danger for advertisers is clear here: As an advertiser you must manage your website placements so you don’t end up associated to the wrong concepts.

Related articles

• Who clicks on banner ads? (sciencetext.com)
• Currencies that buy credibility (brandingblog.com)