Google - Recessio Ad Absurdum?

So the chatterati are full on about Google, Ad values declining and thence onwards to recession, depression and downright doom. (If you want to be truly Recursivist just go to Google Blogs and hit "Google Recession" ). The doom and gloom scenario goes someything like this - the NYT version:

Investors have focused with new intensity on Google’s so-called paid clicks, which grew at 30 percent in the fourth quarter, because the search and advertising giant earns the vast majority of its revenue from text ads, for which it is paid only when users click on them.

Umm...grew at 30% in Q4 - OK, thats a real problem? But soft, that ever reliable datasource ComScore has put the wind up the collective investing knickers:

investors were spooked by a report by the research firm comScore that said clicks on Google ads the United States were flat in January when compared with a year earlier.

More sanguine minds may like to look at this data from HitWise on Google traffic to shopping and retail sites - is that a cyclic pattern I see before me? Could I possibly predict that in January through March people buy less, as opposed to the peak before Xmas?.



Question therefore is why all the hullabaloo now. Is this real, or is this just overall recession anxiety projected on the seemingly recession proof Google (well according to their EU CEO anyway)....

Maybe there were people who actually believed all that recession proof tripe (apart from certain analysts of course, who were famous for writing one thing but believing another....)

As we noted before when Forrester claimed Social Nets were recession proof (just before all the data on Facebook etc audience collapse came out, of course - the world, as you know, rests on a molten core of irony) one should always head for the hills - or at least sell the stock - when such pronouncements are made, and wait for the inevitable discovery of the opposite.

So, following this Broadstuff Universal Stock Tracking (BUST) system, its clearly time to buy Google

Longer term however, you have to wonder about the people who perenially pimp Google - by definition margins erode in any market as competitors enter, and their core tech is old and increasingly less fit for purpose, spawning an increasing "new search" industry.