Google Reality Check

News flash: Google is indeed fallible — and vulnerable. I predicted on several occasions (here, here, and here) that Google’s Print Ad program was less than promising (to put it kindly), and sure enough:

GOOGLE’S RECENT FORAY INTO PRINT advertising fell short of the company’s expectations, a company executive said Wednesday. Speaking on a conference call with investors and the media, Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president for product management, said the venture to auction off print ads in magazines, which launched in February, has been one of the biggest disappointments in the last six months.

In other news, the long tail is starting to wake up to its deep subservience to Google and is trying to wag the dog:

IN ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF A social networking site reaching out to brand advertisers, StyleDiary.net, a fashion-oriented site, has stopped accepting Google AdSense links in favor of cost-per-thousand impression-based ads.

StyleDiary isn’t the only social networking property to recently start offering image ads. Photo-sharing site Flickr also recently struck a deal for its first branding campaign. In Flickr’s case, the marketer was the camera company, Nikon.

What if the Google proletariat were to suddenly rise up en masse and throw off the yoke of AdSense?

What if the masses of sites that only make a few bucks a day off of Google decide that the chump change isn’t worth being complicit in supporting Google’s hegemony?

What if we all tell AdSense to take a frigging hike and stop living off us like leeches?

To misquote Morrissey: Content producers of the world, unite and take over!

I’ve taken down my PPC ads for a day in protest — care to join and see what happens?