I don't know why people always expect companies to do things the government should do. And when they do things that the government should do, they then say the the company could do more. It's false. The government could do more. And if they're out of money they should tax these companies more then.
If you don't support taxes usually you go live in exile in the middle of nowhere. If you want infrastructure, schools, firemen, police, etc. then you support taxes.
- A pool of $20 million in Google Cloud credits ...
A company that has a Bazillion $ in the bank, has means to really make a difference. This is not.
Edit/Clarification:
The original title was: "$800M funding and grants to support ..". Now they changed it.
I take issue with the claim of providing funding, and all they offer is free ADs. I appreciate that Google is doing _something_. I don't think they have to. I don't think that free ADs is a thing that people need right now.
Why does a company with a Bazillion dollars in the bank need to be a charity? If we agree that's the case, we should tax companies more. If not, what's the problem?
I tend to agree with you (and I'm a Googler), but good luck passing that tax legislation in the next few days. This emergency is now. There will be plenty of time to evaluate the degree to which our country has disabled and defunded government institutions, leaving us vulnerable in this sort of crisis - but first we have to get to the other side of the crisis.
We should acknowledge the fact that these corporations are acting now, while keeping the perspective that the cash they are spending isn't in government coffers to spend on this pandemic in part because of the low corporate taxes.
Companies with a bazillion dollars absolutely don't need to be a charity. But I think there's a moral obligation to support the same people and system that allowed the company to accumulate that wealth.
By no means should any company be required to do this - but I know I'm going to take a close look at who I'm spending my money with when this is all over, and I'll be doing it through the lens of what they have contributed back to the communities that let them thrive in the first place.
With all the negative press on Google, I was expecting this to be a decent PR move.
Reading the announcement is somewhat sobering though.
Most of it (590 million) are ad "credits" or "grants".
Keep in mind that Google ad revenue in 2019 was 134 billion.
> $250 million in ad grants to help the World Health Organization (WHO) and more than 100 government agencies globally provide critical information on how to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and other measures to help local communities.
It seems odd to me that institutions are supposed to resort to advertising to be shown above all the false, misleading and inaccurate information.
Is the WHO supposed to have a marketing team optimizing ad spending on Google during a pandemic to rank higher than inferior sources?
There ought the be ranking mechanisms or other side channels to keep important information on top in case of a crisis.
This is like fixing a leaking pipe by forcing in water from the outside.
Edit: apparently all ads relating to Coronavirus have been blocked. See below.
--- Small beneficial side effect: for Google: this drives up the prices a bit for pharma and other companies trying to profit with Corona related topics.
> $340 million in Google Ads credits available to all SMBs with active accounts over the past year.
This sounds decent at first, but also seems more like a token gift on further thought.
I reckon the goal here is mainly to avoid losing those customers. Many SMBs are closed, struggling, and will reduce expenses where possible. Marketing is often the easiest to cut right away, and many of those might not return anytime soon.
The hardest hit businesses are those that had to close down (restaurants, shops, etc). They won't be spending money now.
While a small, free marketing budget is good to have , it will also help stabilize/raise prizes more quickly once everything opens again.
This way they keep those customers at least somewhat engaged and can also prop up the numbers a bit.
> A $200 million investment fund that will support NGOs and financial institutions around the world to help provide small businesses with access to capital.
This is certainly the most impactful. Assuming 70% of that money reaches businesses, it could amount in 14_000 loans of 10_000 each.
I'd assume those to be loans though, so the fund probably won't be much of a loss in the medium term.
> Is the WHO seriously supposed to have a marketing team optimizing ad spending on Google during a pandemic so they rank higher than some "Coronavirus is a hox" article?
Google recently blocked advertisements around COVID19
and related issues. Would you please at least look it up before making this kind of assumptions?
> Google recently blocked advertisements around COVID19
I hadn't seen that, thanks for pointing it out.
There are still ads for terms like "breathing mask" though, so it could probably be circumvented to some extent. But that's to be expected and probably unavoidable.
Especially in light of these efforts, it still seems weird to me though to encourage institutions to use ads for information.
Trick is, nobody is buying ads at the moment because nobody is spending on advertised products. So demand is way down, which means the value of the ads is also way down. By donating half a billion dollars worth of ads at today's rate, they generate half a billion dollars worth of demand and keep the price pumped up. If the numbers work out the right way, they might even be turning a profit by giving ads away.
I think we are are seeing the first images of how organizations are trying to fight the massive forces of deflation - no one wants to be the first to start cutting prices. You'll see companies giving away or donating more and more of their inventory or product, but I think it's inevitable that prices in certain sectors of the economy will start coming down.
Very magnanimous of big G! Obliging us with virtual trinkets that cost them nothing when most of us be out of jobs soon and a few really unlucky ones may die.
Bet their PR department is made up of lawyers only. Complete lack of empathy and imagination. Full marks for greed and being clever by half.
Let’s see if other companies in valley follow their “lead” in hand waving or actually do something that matters.
I think Google could afford to spend a couple billions more to fund the manufacturing and distribution of masks and ventillators, instead of announcing a support package with the bulk in ad credits.
Also, Google employs some of the best marketers on the planet, they should be showing ads for how to wear masks correctly and for practical safety guidelines, and leverage everything they've learned about human psychology to disperse information that could save lives.
That's what it means to actually want to do something, not just pretend with ad credits that ultimately boost your own business.
Right now I'm getting an ad for Milka chocolate as I watch news videos about the pandemic on YouTube, instead of being offered a chance to learn how to safely disinfect groceries.
Google does not need to give out ad credits to WHO to be able to run public safety ads today across all AdSense sites. They have the money and the talent to spin up a massive public safety campaign within days.
> Direct financial support and expertise to help increase the production capacity for personal protective equipment (PPE) and lifesaving medical devices. We’re working with our longtime supplier and partner Magid Glove & Safety, with the goal of ramping up production of 2-3 million face masks in the coming weeks that will be provided to the CDC Foundation. Additionally, employees from across Alphabet, including Google, Verily and X, are bringing engineering, supply chain and healthcare expertise to facilitate increased production of ventilators, working with equipment manufacturers, distributors and the government in this effort.
Google has announced a $800+ billion support package for small businesses and crisis response, $810 billion of that are ad credits and an investment fund for small businesses. There is certainly more that Google could do to fund the manufacturing and distribution of life-saving equipment, even if they do mention it in the last bullet point, without clarifying the amount of financial support.
> I think Google could afford to spend a couple billions more to fund the manufacturing and distribution of masks and ventillators.
Not couple billions, but still the last bullet point is exactly what you're saying.
> Also, Google employs some of the best marketers on the planet, they should be showing ads for how to wear masks correctly and for practical safety guidelines, and leverage everything they've learned about the human psychology to disperse information that could save lives.
Google seems promoting the following link in their top page (which is perhaps one of the most valuable real estate in the internet).
I think we should stop giving them a pass. If they can spend billions on fines, it's possible that they could afford to spend a comparable amount to help people and save lives. Don't you find it insulting that the bulk of the support package is ad credits?
> Google seems promoting the following link in their top page
Only if you search for coronavirus tips and related terms, that is nowhere near the massive marketing campaign Google could pull off across their network to bring vital information to the public.
> Only if you search for coronavirus tips and related terms, that is nowhere near the massive marketing campaign Google could pull off across their network to bring vital information to the public.
I explicitly stated the phrase "in their top page", not "in their search page".
“ A $200 million investment fund that will support NGOs and financial institutions around the world to help provide small businesses with access to capital. As one example, we’re working with the Opportunity Finance Network in the U.S. to help fill gaps in financing for people and communities underserved by mainstream financial institutions. This is in addition to the $15 million in cash grants Google.org is already providing to nonprofits to help bridge these gaps for SMBs.”
What does this really mean? Aside from the NGO stuff it sounds like it could just be taking advantage of the downturn to buy businesses?
The $340 million in Google Ads credits is self serving bullcrap. They are going to flood their ad markets with credits so that they can keep CPMs inflated so that the real advertisers have to continue paying inflated prices.
I appreciate Google's efforts, but it's really depressing to realize how terrible we have it in the Third World and how hard or how little of these funds will trickle down to the people and orgs on the fore fronts.
If I was in the US now, my company and staff would qualify for a large number of help avenues, not to even speak of grants for our work on COVID 19. Over here? The AWS bill we pay monthly has doubled...because our currency has fallen that much. I won't meet payroll on Monday because clients have paused their work and payments to us...etc
Meanwhile here is all manner of funds seemingly available but just another new extra requirement out of reach.
As usual, the beneficiaries will be larger orgs and their army of consultants and friends.
Meanwhile, I'm still sitting with ~$80 USD in an AdSense account that's been there for over 10 years because it's still not a large enough amount to pay out.
I assume the free ad credits are to stave off cratering their own CPM market's bid prices? Conflating that funding with grants for assisting with COVID-19 responses is extremely disingenuous.
Google is helping small businesses by providing Ad credits? Of all things a small business may need, Google thinks Ads are the solution? The response to this crisis has my cynicism and disdain for our system growing every day.
Yes, when the time comes, (but only when the time comes), small business are going to need to tell their customers that they are back and available. Ad spend is a major expense for small businesses like restaurants and small boutiques, and not having that expense will be a big help to getting these companies operating again.
But Google is doing a lot more beyond that:
"A $200 million investment fund that will support NGOs and financial institutions around the world to help provide small businesses with access to capital.... This is in addition to the $15 million in cash grants Google.org is already providing to nonprofits to help bridge these gaps for SMBs."
"Direct financial support and expertise to help increase the production capacity for personal protective equipment (PPE) and lifesaving medical devices. We’re working with our longtime supplier and partner Magid Glove & Safety..."
There’s something called the advertisers dilemma (akin to the prisoners dilemma) for a reason- game theory suggests advertising has become de facto necessary only because other parties do it. In other words, small businesses would choose NOT to advertise if they all cooperated and chose not to.
And I owned a restaurant. Restaurants, by and large, do not advertise on Google Search. If they do, it’s a small fraction of their ad spend. There are many ways to get the message across, like actually being good and having a connection with recurring customers.
> There are many ways to get the message across, like actually being good and having a connection with recurring customers.
The situation is pretty novel since there are significantly less options for offline interaction available this time. I don't think local businesses can cover most of the loss only with recurring customers this time.
So many things in the economy have turned into arms races. Property prices, advertising spending, education spending, status symbols. If we could somehow get out of it we'd have fewer $100m pieces of artwork and a lot more housing and free time.
I pay for Google ads to generate leads for my business. We've seen a drop in conversion rate, but we're still generating leads which we really need right now to continue to operate.
The problem is that the cost per lead just went up dramatically. These ad credits will solve that problem for us and allow us to continue to generate leads. This is exactly the kind of help my business needs right now.
Yes, but it is a zero-sum game. When you get leads, someone else is loosing. So, this does not help economy and does not help all small businesses equally. It only helps Google as it is free advertisement for them.
If they hadn't injected this credit you would see your CPMs decline and you'd be able to generate a better margin. Now your ad dollars have to compete with all of this free money until it runs out. You and I will receive no benefit from this.
Realistically, apart from G Suite access for remote work, they don't actually have much to offer.
That being said, Google ad spend is a huge chunk of marketing budgets, so it probably will help the overall bottom line of these businesses a fair bit.
Yep, ad money has suddenly dried up and auction prices have plummeted so might as well give away the ad credits to inflate the auction prices allowing both a higher tax deduction and better looking performance.
The "might as well give away the ad credits" part makes sense to me, but the part about inflating prices and getting a higher tax deduction doesn't make sense.
I'm not an accountant by any means, but I don't see how there even would be a deduction here. From what I could quickly dig up, even if you donate your services to a nonprofit, you can only deduct your costs, not the price you'd normally charge a paying customer. And of course this isn't even a nonprofit; it's just a freebie to a business.
So while cutting supply might create higher auction prices for paying customers (than you'd otherwise have), the grants themselves don't seem like they'd do anything advantageous for taxes.
Of course, there are expenses with serving ads that they can take out after revenue to reduce how much profit they'll be taxed on, but I'm not sure there are many expenses coming from this giveaway. Seems they would have incurred most of the expense without doing the giveaway because they've already got the computer hardware up and running to serve ads. This is just a way to try to get some value out of the expense that you're going to pay anyway.
You're being downvoted but it wouldn't surprise me if this was discussed while they were coming up with this. While I highly doubt it is their main motivation, I'm sure they've acknowledged it as a benefit.
They should be giving agencies free ad credits then, because a lot of small/medium sized businesses outsource their ad work to agencies...so this doesn't accomplish all that much imo.
Isn't this just an accounting trick? They're going to lose revenue. But can't they now issue this "grant", and then pretend they aren't losing revenue -- they're just issuing a grant?
Or is that not how it works? I don't know, but would like to know.
They're still losing revenue in that, when these ad credits are spent, they're not receiving any actual money from advertisements that would have shown up in place of these free ads.
I’m not an accountant, but I do know that gift cards should be recognized as revenue at the time of services rendered, not at the time of a sale of a gift card. Are grants similar in that a “gift card” is being granted and the revenue can be realized at a later date?
I'm not an accountant, but I believe that's revenue recognition.
I sell you a $10 gift card today. I can't recognize the revenue until you spend the $10.
However, if I know you're going to spend $10 less at my business this year, I can GIVE you a $10 gift card. Then, hopefully, you'll come to my business as usual. When you spend the $10, I can record that as revenue, and then I can record a $10 expense for the cost of sale.
Top line doesn't change. I think. But I'm not an accountant. I don't know.
No, they see their Ad sales declining, so they are trying to stimulate their own business with this act. "Grants" to new customers so they hopefully become buying customers in the future; loans (nothing like becoming a lender in this economy); and of course grants/loans will just bid up ad prices on existing customers. Not to mention all the major business just highjacked $5.75T from the taxpayers so they will have nothing better to do than waste that on ad buys.
Grants are only going to customers with an active account in the previous year. So this does not drive new customers to the platform. If anything, it makes adwords less attractive, because new customers without grants would be competing against old customers with grants.
>$340 million in Google Ads credits available to all SMBs with active accounts over the past year. Credit notifications will appear in their Google Ads accounts and can be used at any point until the end of 2020 across our advertising platforms. We hope it will help to alleviate some of the cost of staying in touch with their customers.
And you seem to be overlooking/ignoring:
>Google offers every employee annually to $10,000 from $7,500. That means our employees can now give $20,000 to organizations in their communities, in addition to the $50 million Google.org has already donated.
$20,000 x 100,000 employees = $2B in discretionary credits (not dedicated to new customers, but certainly does not exclude them)
If Google wants to help small businesses, they should start by stopping their practice of defrauding it's Adsense publishers.
$30k MRR gone overnight alongside $40k already earned in Adsense income siezed by Google. All this happened early this month of March, effectively crippling our ability to take care of employees and survive the Covid-19 crisis.
In an attempt to cut its own cost, Google effectively automates everything, even in terms of detecting abuse (eg. clickjacking or click fraud) and advertisements that go against their rules (I think even in terms of mentioning Covid-19 in ads since I haven't seen any ads mentioning anything about "virus"/"covid"/etc at all this month). I wouldn't doubt you got hit by this automated system.
You would think that by making them so much money (they take 40% of income), you would be entitled to speak to a human. We have always followed their guidelines and just appealed to them but from researching others who have had similar issues, I'm assured that is a big black hole.
Even if you could talk to them, they wouldn't be able to tell you what you did wrong.
If they did tell you what you did wrong, you could figure out what the rules in their spam detecton system was and game the system, and their losses from you or anyone gaming their adspam detection system are far greater than loosing a few false positive customers.
It's ridiculous that Google has to front a glove and mask company the working capital and donate the product to the CDC. That's what the government is supposed to do. The federal government should be providing interest-free working capital and guaranteeing the sale of every glove and mask anyone can produce.
It doesn't have to. This is a choice Google is making on how it wants to conduct charity.
>The federal government should be providing interest-free working capital and guaranteeing the sale of every glove and mask
Sale at what price? It has to be bounded or else it sounds ripe for fraud (people are monsters).
> anyone can produce.
So is the loan for anyone that wants it? Or just for companies that have proven they can make gloves and masks? If the former, what stops people from just using the loan to fund salaries while making a ritual display of making masks for a few months and then declaring bankruptcy after collecting salaries during that time?
I think you are misunderstanding the parent's point. The basic gist is that any glove, mask, and ventilator manufacturer should at the very least get immediate working capital loans/grants from the government to expand production.
Guaranteeing the sale means that the manufacturer will assume no risk for overproduction. The price would be whatever the prevailing market price was before the crisis or maybe with a slight premium.
In essence, the government should remove all business risk for manufacturers of needed equipment.
The government can, in an emergency like this, set prices. They could set prices at the previous price for bulk PPE and order companies to fulfill it and if they refuse, eminent domain them and sell them to someone who will.
As much as this will annoy civil libertarians, the powers of the state are vast and in emergencies should be used to protect people when justifiable and without harming people. The takings clause will ensure that whatever companies are affected will be monetarily compensated and they have recourse through our courts.
I hope the confluence of this administration, plus this pandemic resulting in this piss-poor federal response, is something we'll never see again in our lifetimes.
I'm really glad somebody is stepping up to the plate in the meantime. Every bit counts.
The House just passed a two trillion dollar relief bill. That's almost 3 times the entire value of alphabet. And much of that's going to obtaining medical supplies. What are you talking about?
A quick googling returned nothing? Try "$6T stimulus" or read the Bill itself...
It is true the vast majority of politicians and media are trying to not mention the $4T to the Fed for lending, I won't get into why that is happening (since I am being down voted and even a Googler is saying I am spreading a meme from 2009 what ever that means), so instead of me saying ask why media and politicians are trying to hide/downplay the $6T, maybe ask yourself why you can't even find this info by Googling?
>The White House and the U.S. Senate early this morning, March 25, agreed on a $6 trillion bipartisan economic stimulus package to combat the financial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and assist the Federal Reserve. Some $2 trillion of the measure will assist businesses, workers, and health care systems.
“so the bankers can make money” is a vapid statement ringing back to occupy Wall Street. That’s not what the money is for, not will it particularly help bankers anymore than it will help every person with a money market account, a mortgage, or a job at a corporation that uses loans.
$4T is going to the Federal Reserve...up to $1,200 will be going directly to taxpayers, to put the ratio in perspective, if the money was all going to taxpayers directly each taxpayer would be getting over $18,000, instead they will get $1,200. You are saying it will help every person with a mortgage or job at a corporation that uses loans...which simply means it will help the loan/mortgage holders and services which helps the banks.
I have at times worried this crisis could be used to cement our transition to a Corporatocacy. There has been a huge number of roles that the government SHOULD be performing in at least a partnership that appear to be simply being fulfilled by private corporations. On one hand, while i'm glad to see some real leadership, I worry about the long term ramifications.
How much in taxes has Google avoided over the years???
Thats the actual funding the Government was Already supposed to have (and then be responsible for using correctly) to do this.
So, in my opinion, the Government (read: the fucking citizens of the country) should demand fealty payments from ALL the companies that were under-paying taxes.
All companies, who are considered "corp=people" should be taken to task and be required to PAY rather than get a bailout.
Have you noticed the marketing push by Verizon of late?
That company, for whom Ajit is their mole in the .gov, should be just nationalized and turned over. (obviously, this then means that its a 100% surveillance company... so that must be weighed)
