*Google Deliberately Sells Fewer Ads — and May Have Gone Too Far

/*title:谷歌故意出售较少广告—可能已走的太远 */
Translator: Frank
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Listening to Google’s executives on their conference call with investors Thursday afternoon, you’d never know that the company’s second-quarter results fell short of expectations and its shares plummeted 10 percent in after-hours trading.

听到谷歌的行政官和投资商们于周四下午的电话会议，你决不会想到公司的二季度业绩没有预见的下降，同时，公司股指在接下来的交易中大跌10%。

Since Google has chosen, as a matter of principle, not to offer any guidance in advance about what its sales and profits will be, it avoids any embarrassing questions if it misses its own marks. So Eric Schmidt, and other executives, blithely insisted that all was well.

鉴于谷歌已作出选择，按照规则，谷歌不能提前对它的销售额和利润是多少提供任何指导，如果没达到财政指标，这会避免一些财政窘迫问题。所以Eric Schmidt，还有其他执行官，轻率地坚持一切都是好的。

Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, said that while the company sees a bit of softness in ads for areas like auto lenders and real estate agents, other areas that might be economically sensitive are holding up, such as ads for home appliances. He suggested that Google is benefiting because shoppers look to the Internet for bargains.

Hal Varian，谷歌首席经济学家，说虽然公司看到在像汽车租赁和地产代理方面的广告代理有些乏力，但是其他可能是经济敏感型领域的广告代理，如家庭用具广告代理，正在上升。他表明谷歌正从中受益，因为购物者在寻求网上交易。

“We have a little bit of the Wal-Mart effect going on,” he said. “As times get tough, people will watch their dollars, and in many cases, that means doing more shopping online.”

“我们让些许的‘沃尔玛效应’发挥其作用，”他说。“随着时间变的紧迫，人们将观注他们的口袋，而在许多情况下，那就意味更多的在网上购物。”

Some of the softness in Google’s advertising revenue, moreover, was self-inflicted. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president for product management, said that Google had chosen to reduce its advertising coverage — the percentage of Web pages on which it displays advertising — to an all-time low.

谷歌在广告收益方面的某些降温现象，加之，谷歌自身的原因。Jonathan Rosenberg，谷歌产品管理部门的高级副总裁，说到谷歌已选择减小它的广告覆盖率—它发布的广告占所在网页的百分比—到空前的低。

That’s a puzzling decision on the surface. Virtually any other company facing slow economic times would be interested in increasing the places in which it could sell ads. It certainly wouldn’t take steps to reduce them.

But Mr. Rosenberg said that Google has no plans to increase its coverage because of its efforts to improve what it calls “ad quality” — the idea that Google should only show ads that users actually like. Mr. Rosenberg said that the company’s co-founder, Larry Page, would like to see even fewer ads.

“Larry often says we would be better off if we showed one ad — the perfect ad,” said Mr. Rosenberg. Mr. Page was not on the conference call to speak for himself.

But Sergey Brin, the company’s other co-founder, wondered aloud whether Google in fact had gone too far.

“There is some evidence we have been a little more aggressive in decreasing coverage than we should have been,” Mr. Brin said. He noted that Google developed technology that helped increase its revenue from advertising (largely by finding ads that are more interesting to users). Indeed, it had a rule of thumb that for every potential dollar the company could earn from an improvement in advertising revenue, it would reduce the number of pages showing ads so that Google would only earn 50 cents more in revenue.

“Clearly that is not the ideal strategy, because we don’t want to end up with no ads,” Mr. Brin said.

Investors, presumably, breathed a sigh of relief hearing that.