MarketWatch Sees Google Ad Drop

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

MarketWatch has interviewed some Google (GOOG) advertisers with fairly large budgets and found that a number of them feel that ad prices on the big search engine are getting so high that they have to cut back. The group interviewed by MarketWatch spent between $4 million and $10 million on search ads last year.

The process employed by MarketWatch is hardly scientific, but, if the financial website has uncovered a trend among Google ad customers, the lofty price of the stock could be in trouble as its Q4 06 and Q1 07 numbers hit the market.

At $468, Google may seem low to the price targets of some banks, which see the stock moving over $600.

But, if Google’s advertisers are cutting back due to higher costs, the 52-week low of $331.55 is not that far away.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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