On February 11 2009, 29 MP’s signed an Early Day Motion explaining their concerns about Google’s dominance in the search advertising marketplace. The motion urged ministers to “consider measures to prevent the monopolisation of the online search advertising market.” It has come to light that this year Google has increased its share of the online marketplace to over 90%. The motion was supported by 25 Labour MPs, one Conservative, two Liberal Democrats and a member of the Scottish National Party.

Andrew Dismore, a Labour MP supporting the motion said, “A monopoly is unhealthy, Google cornering the market is not good for competitive pricing or quality of service. The Government should recognise that there is a potential problem.”

“The Competition Commission should draw up recommendations to protect consumers – in this case, the people buying the advertising.”

Is Google suffering from its own success? Google does not set the price of its advertising; the cost is driven and set but the advertiser, bidding for position in an auction style environment. Competition dictates the marketplace and this has long been seen as a fair method of determining ad placement.

“On the internet, competition is literally one click away,” said a Google spokesman. “We have to prove our value to our users and advertisers every day, because if they’re unhappy with Google, there’s nothing preventing them from switching to another search engine.”

It had to happen as some point, MySpace.com is teaming up with Internet search giant Google Inc. in a bid to extend MySpace’s exposure and to take on the rapid growth of their rival Facebook Inc.
Facebook’s unique social environment and user experience has seen the company grow at an astonishing rate. With over 130 million active users Facebook is the 4th most visited website in the World (comScore). It’s also the number 1 photo sharing application in the world (comScore), with over 10 billion photos uploaded to the site and over 30 million photos uploaded daily. The potential advertising exposure and revenue generated by the company is huge, but Facebook did not decide to partner with Google, the largest supplier of internet advertising content, they controversially went to Microsoft.

Myspace could be considered one of pioneers of Social Networking, established in 2004 and acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2005, MySpace currently has over 127 Million active users. It came to fame as part of the MTV generation, a place for bands, actors and film companies to showcase their work and interact with their fans.

The details of the alliance between Google and MySpace were released on Monday in Paris. Over the past seven months MySpace have been working on easier ways to allow their users to connect their MySpace accounts to other social networking sites. MySpace will be working with Google’s existing services to allow this to happen. Smaller sites with blogs and limited technical ability will be able to use Google Friend connect in the future, which will allow them to add social networking elements to their sites.

MySpace and Google started working together over a year ago on a service known as “Open Social” which was designed to compete against Facebook’s massively popular online software plug in repository. But the news of a new alliance must come as a shock to Facebook and their potential marketplace domination.

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