PricewaterhouseCooper placed global ad spend at $385 billion last year, and estimates that by 2010 it will exceed half-a-trillion. So, not just a notion, but rather a firm reality regarding ad growth.

Google makes most of their money by way of Adwords, which is paid search. By all accounts paid search is expected to see continued growth in 2008. In 2007 growth was 28%. According to J.P. Morgan Chase, paid search will increase to 32% in 2008, making it a $15.5 billion business.

Also, something caught my eye a few weeks ago; Elias Plishner at Universal McCann reported the internet accounts for less than 10% of all U.S ad spend, but more than 20% of the time Americans spend consuming media. TV spend and viewing was equal at about 40%. However, newspaper and magazine ad spend outpaced consumption time. This seems to place Google in the position to chip away at the future half-a-trillion pot of ad dollars. Advertisers want eyeballs, and if they are online, the dollars will follow.

Yet, Google understands a truly successful media effort requires TV, online, radio, etc. So they continue to make inroads in "offline" media. I"m sure the payoff on these efforts are years down the road, but it truly signals this is not some myopic relic of the dot bust era as referenced in prior posts.

I have no idea what the stock is worth, but they provide a product to the advertising industry that will be everlasting. Finally, their potential with small business has not even been scratched, with only 50% of all small business owning a PC...

No Shit. They're privy to the new communications law they (HRC in, BO out) just signed.

Disgusting. Watch what you search. Seriously.

Hey! Were these guys alive in 2000-01? What part of "We are going to do you prison style" Market Manipulation don't they understand? Did they really think that they were immune from the same forces that destroyed hundreds of other hi-teks or forced them into the arms of Old Money suitors waiting to buy them on the cheap? What rubes.

If life gives you bad stocks, make wallpaper.

Google stock is just another fantasy bubble.

I mean seriously haven't people learned from the doggyfood.com era?

Google represents a slightly more-sophisticated variation of the same old "Dot-Bomb Bust" that we saw in the mid-to-late 1990's. It was, and is, basically a stock-play. Doing their IPO in the way that they did enabled the profits to be earned much more quickly.

But Google is much too big, and although it has many service-oriented offerings it is not really bringing in revenues from any of them. It's bringing in the dollars from advertising, and my computer without any particular effort filters out all of those ads, just as it does for the advertising-content of The Huffington Post.

We're going to see some fairly precipitous falls throughout the stock-market as the consequences of inflation and "fraud on the market" take hold, but I believe that companies like Google which basically sell nothing will take it on the chin much harder than, say, Apple or Netflix which actually provide something of material value.

We don't really need "a search-engine to rule them all." And when you cut away all the fluff and noise, that's all that Google really is or really ever was. That's their one ... and only ... core ... business.