People who use Google are Valuable

Megan McArdle doesn't have a lot of faith in those of us who Google. People who arrive at a website from Google, she says, are "low quality" in terms of their value to advertisers:

As far as advertisers are concerned, most google searchers are closer to the guy who picks up the Pennysaver, than to someone you'd deliberately buy an ad to reach.

I simply don't understand this. Does Megan think that advertisers discount the amount of money they're willing to pay for an ad on a website by the percentage of that website's readers who come from Google? Of course not. On the internet, readers are readers, and if readers of businessweek.com are worth more to advertisers than readers of time.com, that isn't changed if people start arriving at businessweek.com via Google rather than via a bookmark in their web browser.

Indeed, I'd hazard that ceteris paribus, Google searchers are more valuable than the average internet reader. Websites such as aol.com and usatoday.com still get a lot of traffic mainly because their readers don't use Google. On the other hand, if I want news and analysis on some esoteric topic and type "modified duration of investment-grade syndicated loans" into Google, I'll end up at the Journal of Banking and Finance, where I'm sure their advertisers are very happy to see me.

Indeed, the use of Google to find news and analysis online demonstrates engagement on two different levels, both of which are still less common online than you might think. Remember that the most popular news source in the US is TV: you turn it on, you sit back, and you're told what you ought to know. Second to TV is newspapers: you pick them up, you sit back, but then you start actively picking and choosing the stories you want to read and ignoring the stories you don't want to read. And websites like usatoday.com and aol.com work that way too. They give their readers a choice of headlines which can then be clicked on and read. Someone using Google, by contrast, already knows what they're interested in, and is actively seeking out information on that news topic. They're informed, and engaged, and invested in finding things out.

The other level is that someone using Google has faith in their own abilities to discern quality from junk. They might just use URLs on the Google results page as a first-level filter, and find themselves more likely to read something on wsj.com than something on blogspot.com. Alternatively, they might read what looks to be most germane and interesting, and judge the content on its own merits. Either way, they're again showing active informed engagement in the news gathering and reading process. These are the people that advertisers want!

Megan thinks that the WSJ can charge higher ad rates precisely because its readers pay money to read its content. I doubt it. Maybe she should ask her old bosses at economist.com whether ad rates there have come down since the content became free. Somehow I doubt it.