Once upon a time there was a lumbering Giant. He lived among the industrious peasants of a quaint village. He was a helpful Giant. He gathered loads of wood for the peasants, and helped them herd their stray goats, and scooped up big troughs of water from the nearby loch. Sometimes he even played with the peasants, putting on silly performances and telling the occasional dirty Giant joke.
But Giant had a voracious appetite, and he was kind of an asshole. Any time he felt a little bit hungry, he would gobble up a few goats – the number it took to feed the whole village for weeks – forcing the peasants to subsist on cabbage water. Even less couth, sometimes Giant went a little loony and trampled the hardworking peasants, squishing them into the grass like goopy provincial pancakes.
The peasants didn’t know what to make of their predicament. Was it worth the loss of goats and industrious peasants to have Giant’s help? Or should they beat the holy living crap out of Giant?
I’ll tell you what I’d do were I an industrious peasant with a Giant: I’d figure out a way to contain and train Giant – or banish him altogether – to keep him from destroying my whole dang village!
And that, my friends, is why I almost never click Google ads.
If you didn’t decipher my fairy tale analogy on your own by connecting the dots between title and tale, let me help you: Google is the lumbering Giant. The goats are marketing dollars. And the peasants are web-based entrepreneurs, working like hell to eke out a humble existence when Google comes along with its bottomless pockets and its boundless greed, reproducing or killing small ideas in one fail swoop.
Why is Google so powerful? Because we – the people – make it so. By pointing our mice to $10-per-click ads in Google (at a ratio of about 3 in 10 results), Gmail, Google+, ezines, blogs and more, we feed it, and feed it, and feed it some more until it is so big and strong and heavy that it can’t be contained, can’t be stopped, can’t even be reasoned with. The company is testing self-driving cars for Pete's sake!
What’s worse, many people click on pay-per-click ads just to be jerks to one another, thinking only of where the dollars come from, not where the dollars go. In fact, just last week I met with a seemingly sensible and professional business person who said she clicks her competitor’s ads every chance she gets. The strategy seems two-fold: to drain their marketing coffers, and to anonymously crap on them.
Okaaaay. I might be a competitive bitch when it comes to business, but that tactic is just retarded. And unethical. It’s like stealing, but all of the ill-gotten loot goes to Google. It's Robin Hood stealing from Little John to feed the megarich. Google says it strives to detect, stop and refund “click fraud” dollars. I say: yeah right. It is simply not in Google’s best interest to broadly police click fraud. Would you cut off a big branch of your backyard money tree?
Google is a great search engine. It’s helpful and it’s convenient. Some of the things it builds (or more likely, buys) are really cool. We can thank ad clicks for that. Advertising revenue is the reason Google can continue to employ the world’s best and brightest programmers to keep its search products clean and targeted. But the search giant has grown far too powerful, based on too many thoughtless clicks. Now it extends its reach into the deepest corners of the web and ravenously alters business and marketing around the world with a snap of its giant fingers.
We only have ourselves to blame. We’re willingly, eagerly, selfishly, endlessly giving it resources without questioning its moral compass. The moral of my story? Go ahead, use Google. It’s a great tool. Click organic links all day every day. But for the love of fair trade and entrepreneurial spirit, think before you click Google ads. Those gobbled up goats could be yours, and the next peasant pancake could be you.
