What is Google?

A few months ago, there were several rumors that Google would create a payment system that would compete with PayPal. Several peopled took this as a sign that Google had strayed away from their core competency, and that they had no relevant experience in being a financial company. However, as you look at the growth of new services whose sole revenue is from Google's AdSense, you start to wonder if Google really is new to the financial business. Paul Kedrosky's worry that Web 2.0 is just a google affiliates program is like wondering if Web 1.0 was just a program for Visa and Mastercard.

Once again, the beginnings of this idea came from a conversation I had with Charlie. The value of his attention is important to him, and he was wondering what the best way to get compensated for his interactions on the web.

I think the biggest obstacle to this goal is with payment systems. Every day, each of us performs a series of activities on the web that could potentially create value. The trouble is that typically each discrete activity produces a very small amount of that value. I may generate a lot of value in a day - through my browsing history, or my tagging, or through referrals to new services - but it's broken into too many pieces. Even worse, very rarely do more than a few of the pieces have value to the same party. In aggregate, the total value created and the total value enjoyed are large, but the value of each transaction is so low.

It's a little difficult to explain clearly what I'm trying to say, so here's an example. Let's say 1000 people in an ecosystem each perform 100 activities every day. Each of these transactions create 5 cents of value to one of 100 other parties (websites, advertisers, etc). So each of these users creates $5 of value a day (100 x .05). Each of the "payers" could conceivably receive $50 (1000 x .05) worth of value each day. So as a system, there is $50K of value created everyday. But any two parties would only ever have a transaction worth 5 cents - so the costs of sharing that value are too large, and they end up giving up that value. Either one person gets all the value (like when I read a blog and learn something, but don't give anything back to the author), or worse, the transaction doesn't even occur (if I didn't refer a good service, because I got nothing out of the referral).

There 2 options to monetize your created value in this environment

• Limit your own interactions such that all 100 of your transactions are with 1 person, so that you can build up $5 of value with them, where it's actually worth splitting it.



• Figure out a way to keep a big central clearing house, lowering the costs of splitting the value via economies of scale, to the point where it's worth doing, and then charging for it (google or paypal model)

Google has done the second with it's AdSense program. People who have been talking for years about developing a reasonable micropayment scheme for paying for content on the web seem to have missed the fact that Google has done just this. Because of AdSense, I can now monetize my attention, and pay the producers of content with that attention.

This is just the first step though - my interest in a subject is just one transaction that can be monetized, and arguably the one with the least value. Just yesterday, I referred people to 2 different online services - Writely, and NumSum (future post about trying to move entirely online is forthcoming). In both cases, I've provided value to these sites, but got nothing in return. If each of those referrals was worth < $1, it's not worth it to the sites to set up a reward program, or to me to sign up for it. However, what about a "referral central", that would allow smaller sites to subscribe to a joint referral program. They pay for 1000s of referrals at a time, and I get credit for all my referrals across multiple services.

Moving even further up in value, is pay for sales. Amazon and others have affiliate programs, but this is essentially option one - limiting your referrals to one store, to build enough credit there. What about a meta-affiliate network, where I could refer people to a variety of specialty stores, and get credit for every sale. This gets closer to the holy grail of advertisers of "pay-for-sale", and allows me to refer others via blog/email/IM to the best place, not just where I have an affiliate set up.

These are exactly the types of things that CAN'T happen in the off-line world. Why haven't we made them happen on-line yet?