Google moves closer to sharing a cut of every transaction

Another brilliant strategic move from Google - the PPA ad platform the search leader announced today.

Why is this so smart? Because an ad that pays "publishers" per action - per transaction - encourages buyers to do all their online shopping through Google.

It is increasingly trivial to set up your own website. I've got a few - this one, a wiki, a personal blog I write for a small circle of friends. You've probably got at least one too. So if Google is offering pay-per-transaction ads, next time you want to...oh, go on holiday to France in June, say, you'll knock up a page with the words "holiday, France, June" on it, run some Google pay-per-transaction ads over the page, click on a few, and buy from the one that suits. Thus not only getting the exact holiday you wanted delivered right onto the page in front of you by Google's matching algorithm, but keeping the publisher's transaction ad fee for yourself.

This is beyond advertising. This is an acknowledgement by the most successful media business in the world that "publisher" and "audience" are meaningless labels now, and a move to once more redraw the market in Google's favour in light of that understanding. For the foreseeable future not only the easiest but the cheapest way to buy almost anything may now be via a Google PPA ad on your own website, when you take into account the publisher's fee you can keep that way. Every time we think Google can't achieve another exponential jump in scale, it turns out we just weren't thinking broadly enough about the size of the market Google is in. Organising the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful has a whole lot of commercial upside yet to run.