Ads: Google v. Everyone

Google’s big. Everyone knows it, and they got big because of online ads. Everyone wants a piece of that pie, but sadly, all they’re getting is crumbs. There’s a lot of competition in the space, but none of it is very successful, Microsoft certainly isn’t. Panama is seeing some signs of life in the Yahoo camp, but it is still a long, long ways off from taking any significant business from AdSense.

Microsoft isn’t throwing the towel, but they’re already making excuses. They’re now saying (and I paraphrase)… “Yeah, yeah, yeah, search has been really profitable, whoop-de-doo, but that’s totally yesterday’s news. Coming up it’s going to be rich media ads!” Which confuses me, I mean, how is that still not search driven? That is, it’s just as easy to serve a text ad as a rich media ad to a search result. And Microsoft still won’t be eating at that table unless they do something better than Tafiti. Oh wait they are, they want to put their grubby little ads all over your desktop.

To some degree I think that service oriented ad networks may be able to get some traction. It is, as we all know, all about the benjamins (or washingtons in my own particular case) and I was reading with mild interest about YieldBuild. You give them some positions on your site and they automatically go about optimizing the size and color of the ads and the ad networks that they put in each one. If this works, it helps as ad placement is a dark art that few really want to get into - if they can help out with this automatically in a way that genuinely increases revenue, I think people will go for it. Google Website Optimizer is similar, but is a lot more involved and out of the scope of what most folks will want to do, I suspect. I’ve seen schemes like this for a variety of niches, some seem to work, others seem to be just schtick. It’ll be curious to see what shows up in this space.

Google, on the other hand isn’t staying still as all these competitors try to figure out what to do. In addition to getting into the display ads biz by buying DoubleClick, they’re trying to expand all over the place. The first major one I remember hearing was a move into radio. As far as I can tell, that isn’t really happening for them. But they’re keeping at it.

More recently, they’re buying their way into in-game advertising a new and controversial vehicle for selling ads. And, unsurprisingly, now they’re working with Nielsen to get demographic information on tv watchers. Google TV ads apparently have been selling since Q3 2006, I suspect more is on the way.

Google’s moving on to more frontiers to try and hawk their wares. Thus far it hasn’t been more than a drop in the G’s massive bucket, but that could easily change. One possibility is that Google just gets better at selling these other types of ads. If you ask me, though, I think that everything is coming online. Everything’s increasingly being broadcast over the internet, radio, tv, games, everything and it’s all becoming much more closely interconnected. If you’re listening to internet radio, why couldn’t commercial time be personalized directly to you? That is, a commercial slot would open and you’d be redirected to a google ad server to get your little audio ad. Same with tv on the net. Who knows? Not me, but I think Google has an inkling and they’re just practicing for the big show right now, getting their foot in the door while they buy up all the bandwidth that there is to be bought and wait for some more convergence.

Oct 24th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: google · microsoft