Google Remain Focused

In 2006, Eric Schmidt Google’s CEO foresaw a day when Google would have more than 1,000 employees serving a radio advertising business. This week, three years later, Google Audio Ads had failed to live up to expectations and left the radio advertising business.

The move also demonstrates Google’s efforts to cut costs and focus on fewer and safer projects as its core search advertising business has slowed sharply during the recession.

Only three ago, Google ended its Print Ads program, which sold spots in newspapers. Today Google has had some success in TV advertising and has not thrown in that towel especially give its potential to support YouTube.

Google Audio Ads had faced challenges since it began in 2006, when Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a radio advertising technology company. Google paid $102 million in cash for dMarc, but the agreement included additional payments of up to $1.1 billion based on performance targets.

Google’s cull is not just restricted to advertising. Last year they cut Lively, Google’s answer to Second Life. Other culls include; Dodgeball, a mobile service aimed at connecting young bar-hoppers, Catalogue Search, which indexed paper catalogues to offer online search, Notebook, a tool to allow users to take notes as they visited web sites and Jaiku, their answer to Twitter.

Google has proved that when it comes to investment, they may pump money and effort in but they projects have to deliver. It would be interesting to understand what they see as their targets for Book Search but unlike Microsoft, it’s highly unlikely that they will walk away from it in a hurry.