Google Misses Earnings: Is Anyone Surprised?

It blows my mind that forecasters, including Google’s internal forecasts, did not more clearly take into account the impact that their June attack on arbitrage would have on their earnings. Google, bowing to pressures of general advertisers and searchers, decided to bite the hand that feeds it – the masses of Adsense publishers and Adwords arbitrage experts who poured money into Google. While their campaigns were targeted and only directly affected a handful of publishers and advertisers, the ripple effect (damn those ripple effects) spread throughout the industry sounding the bell tone: “if Google will go after Arbitrage, eventually, they will go after Made-For-Adsense”. I would love to see the defection rate of this past quarter compared...