What Could Bring Google Down

The past decade has seen Google rise from nothing to being one of the most recognized brands in the whole world and, at the same time, a competitor to the older technology giant, Microsoft. Not bad, what started as a Stanford University research project came to be the single most dominant search engine on the Internet and, furthermore, an ever expanding empire that doesn't seem to have a challenge ahead of it that might eventually pose an even mildly serious threat.

The tenth birthday of the Mountain View based company comes with what looks like a different approach from Yahoo of the revenue subject that everybody is talking about. Karsten Weide, the director of IDC's digital media and entertainment program, says that "Google's top priority is to diversify their revenue sources", as it relies on search ads for 99.1% of its total revenue. Imagine what would happen if the online advertising market were to suffer a disruption or anything of the sort. That would be something similar to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the Great Search Engine, it would wipe it clean, with only the infrastructure remaining standing, and that only remotely.

The much-talked-about deal between Google and DoubleClick is the partial answer to this problem, but that won't be closed until later next year, if it is going to go down at all, as both Europe and US commissions have required time for a more in-depth analysis of the situation.

The most immediate challenge here is advertising contained within online videos -- that is, online commercials, according to Weide. "Google's acquisition of YouTube was designed to shore up a weakness in video advertising, but this is an emerging market that is still in flux, and billions of dollars will go to the eventual winner", he says.