...is that a competing business down the road from mine has decided to spend $20/click for my business name, so now I have to spend much more than that in order for customers who already want to make an appointment with me to be able to call my phone number consistently. Google are complete gangster at this point... "nice business you have there."
How is that not intentionally causing marketplace confusion?
Also, if you roll over and pay Google, you are damaging your ability to defend your own business name as a trademark. Trademarks are lost if you don't defend them. Talk to a real lawyer, ASAP.
We've considered seeking legal counsel. Part of the problem is that the two primary words of the business name are a generic service offered by this type of business (40 years ago SEO was not a big consideration). Also very few of our customers take the care to quote the two-word phrase, so their queries could plausibly be sent to the competitor which offers that service as well. This competitor has itself recently added the name of yet another lucrative related service to its name, presumably as an SEO measure.
That said, I'd be very eager to see any more advice you might have, or any links to resources you think might be helpful to us.
In that case, businesses exist that can help your business search for and monitor more defensible trademarks. If you are truly hurt by competitors buying AdWords, you really should thrust your hand into the fire and suffer the pain of rebranding now, because it's only going to get worse the longer you wait. Switching from "Snake Plumbing" to "Jessaustin Pipewranglers" would hurt temporarily as you trained your existing customer base to use the new name, but uncommon or newly coined words are so much more defensible.
Seriously, where's the Spotify of blogs?
It might be the best we can do, given that the price of information has plummeted, but I hope something better comes along.
Also, at the end of the day, I think a lot of people would prefer ads over paying for content directly. What percentage of Spotify users are on the free plan dispite it's disruptive ads?
> If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented.
If the ad blocking becomes so widespread that the ad-supported model becomes unsustainable, I think a lot of people will be unhappy with what happens next. There will be a lot more paywalls and a lot more native advertising, which will be fine for entrenched players but much harder for very small publishers to pull off.
The cool thing about AdWords was you could write a little blog and actually make a few dollars running ads on it just by adding a snippet of code. Maybe micropayments can take care of that some day?