SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING GOO...
The top discussion thread on Techmeme today, is on Google's announcement that they're adding a pay-per action (PPA) model to their juggernaut of a business model based on cost-per-click (CPC). There are a fair number of good pieces on the importance of these, and I'd point to the TechCrunch, Valleywag and New York Times ones in particular.
What caught my note particularly, is this observation by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch in his write-up on the announcement:
"Like CPC ads, PPA advertising wasn’t invented by Google. Search engine Snap has been selling ads this way for some time, for example."
For you tech history buffs, Snap is the brain-child of Bill Gross, of Idealab fame, who was also the brains behind GoTo.com (later renamed Overture, and sold to Yahoo!).
It's well-documented amongst Google historians (particularly by John Battelle in his book "The Search"), how the company innovated around the CPC model pioneered by GoTo.com, with it's own twist, and made it the best business model in the tech industry, well, since Microsoft.
One of my favorite phrases is the term OTSOG, which stands for "On the Shoulders of Giants". It has many origins, but the most famous one is Isaac Newton. As his Wikipedia entry notes:
"Newton himself was rather more modest of his own achievements, famously writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants"
Seems OTSOG could be paraphrased in a different way.
Google has, and hopefully continues to achieve great things by standing On the Shoulders of Gross.
It'll be interesting to see how they innovate around PPA as they have around CPC.
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