I love reading Wired, every month the magazine is a good mix of technology, politics, science and other things from the town of Geeksville. 

I never really log-on to their website purely because I read so many blogs and tech websites, picking up an actual paper pub and flicking through it over a coffee makes a nice treat. 

Anyway I digress…

In this months issue there was quite a good piece on Google, their recent acts of immorality and the organisation changing it’s stance on their original promise of “not doing evil”. 

Wired as we all know is a US magazine and all the examples given in the piece were based on Google’s immoral doings in its homeland. 

Personally I think the acts of immorality have not been exclusive to the US. Google’s recent move to allow gambling advertisers to use paid search advertising in the UK is quite frankly, the icing on their immoral cake. 

They have clearly opened up their advertising platform to gambling advertisers in order to sustain financial business growth throughout the credit crunch. 

With a currently unstable economic climate, people are being encouraged to be wise with their cash. This means living within our means, avoiding credit use, overdrafts etc. 

Taking all of the above into account, what does Google do? They help gambling companies push gambling (a significant waste of money and cause for bad debt) onto the public for the sake of sustaining their own profitability and growth.

Hmm…I’ll leave you guys to be judge of their actions, in the meantime enjoy the pic I’ve scanned from this months Wired.

NYT was essentially a “walled garden”, however it appeared to be open in the eyes of the search engines, many people suspected unofficial agreements being made between Google and the NYT.

This may have been true at the time but since then Google launched first click free a service which allows providers of premium news content to have their content indexed and ranked within Google News whilst only providing excerpts of the full articles to surfers, requesting for a subscription fee to continue reading.

This is great news for publishers who rely on advertising/subscription driven business models as having “first click free” traffic will ensure consistent revenue is generated from new content and strategic placement of calls to sale at the end of article excerpts will help to drive paid subscriptions.

Another reason why this is a win for publishers is that publishers have been known to use paid search advertising to drive traffic and increase page impressions and ad impressions through targeting the search “long tail” and buying as much inventory on low CPC’s as possible. As Google tighten their paid search guidelines through the quality score system it will become harder for affiliates and publishers to make revenues via arbitraging traffic.

“First click free” will hopefully counteract the growing stringencies of paid search advertising for publishers at least.