Is Helpouts Google’s Amazon Mayday Moment?

Google Helpouts is now out and about, with an interesting business model. Not sure how it fits into Google.

Google Helpouts has been launched this week with much fanfare. It got coverage on all relevant technology blogs and news outlets, and will definitely be tried out by many. If you've been following me, you might have seen my analysis of the Experts Market that is created around WebRTC. Helpouts is such a service.

The gist of it:

• Google hand picks the experts manually. There are a 1000 of them now I am told
• Each expert has his profile. He decides his specific payment terms and availability. His "customers" rank and review him
• Customers use discovery to select an expert and schedule a meeting with him
• Payment is done with Google Wallet, and Google takes its 20% share off the transaction

Not different than the rest of the pack, with the one minor caveat of this being Google and not a small startup vendor.

I have my doubts about where this is headed. At first glance, it is too small a market for the likes of Google. Assuming a ratio of 1:1000 experts per population, with 1 monetized call a week, at an avarage of $20 a call, you get $200M a year in transaction fees. My guess it will be a lot less for the next several years; and today, it is crumbs. And Google doesn't seem to me like the vendor that can open this market up.

Why?

Because of the first bullet – Google hand picks the experts manually. Google isn't about manual – it is about automation of everything, done for the purpose of increasing scale. This manual process is no doubt to get people on board and to maintain high quality in the initial launch and throughout the first year or so, but is this something Google can maintain and do through time?

To me, this is similar to Amazon's new Mayday service for Kindle Fire tablets. In this service, Amazon provides a video support service, available in a single click from the tablet, with a target of 15 seconds on average of wait time. That from a company that is all about self-service and had nothing to do with online customer support.

Both vendors are now using WebRTC, or WebRTC-like technologies.

And both are making use of it to try new grounds and do things that are out of their comfort zone and DNA.

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Will Helpouts succeed? Who knows.

Will the experts market be large enough to sustain the current vendors in it? Another unknown.

Fascinating times.