iblaine - 6:50 am on Jan 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

The commercialization of Google assets is a tricky subject and often one conflicting interests.

Froogle is currently an R&D asset that is focussing on providing a web surfer with a high quality shopping search experience. Shopping is different that free info on the WWW. There is a reason that big malls have anchor tenents like Nordstrom and Sears. There is a barrier to entry for any joe schmo to get their product in front of potential shoppers.

Overtime the people heading up Froogle will realize that they will need to have some form of quality control to be listed in Froogle. The easiest way to do this is charge the merchant. Reason being is that if the merchant is willing to pay to be listed, then the merchant will most likely be making money, which means that people are probably buying the merchants products, which means that the product being listed in Froogle is probably of interest to other people.

However, this point is mute. As soon as Google goes public in June 2004, there will be outside pressue for Google to monetize all of their assets. R&D managers will be replaced with Business managers. The Froogle business manager will implement a PPC or mutated CPA pricing model to be listed in Froogle. Merchants and affiliates should get the free gravy while they can.