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Google to Distribute Image Ads, Plans Email List Service
comforteagle writes "For the next shot in the search engine advertising war Google has launched image ads in addition to their popular text AdSense program. From Google's explanation page: 'Image ads will show in rotation with text ads. On a page by page basis, Google's technology determines whether text ads or image ads are likely to make you more money, and serves the best ads to your page.'" Another reader writes: "eWEEK.com is reporting that Google has begun testing a new mailing list service, Google Groups 2, sure to go head-to-head with Yahoo Groups. It eventually will replace what is today only a Usenet archive. Users of the new beta can start their own mailing lists (public or private) and in typical Google fashion, it is promising to put search front and center (even hinting at postings being included in Web search one day)."
Sounds fair to me. Unlike the text ones, they're blockable, too, for those who aren't interested.
If they have some kind of algorithm for selecting whether to show text or graphics ads (as the summary implies) ... maybe clicking a few text ads once in a while will let the system know that you aren't interested in the graphic ads.
:-( )
Lets hope they don't correlate this with search history. (X10 ads aplenty, here I come
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
I hope the people at Google know what they're doing... it would seem to me that for a company that has been so focused on providing an excellent search engine they're suddenly branching out very quickly (Mailing lists, Gmail...).
I wonder if this has anything to do with their impending IPO?
Well, we finally got a Google topic, that's a good start. ;)
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have no "faith" in Google. I just haven't been let down yet. If they ever trip, I'll be using another search engine quick as you can blink. That's what Google did to Altavista/etc, and what someone else will do to them if they don't stay smart.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Hey, does anyone else keep getting a little frustrated with the fact that Google seems hell-bent on introducing new services [orkut, gmail, etc.] but they haven't really done anything about the fact that 'optimizers' have basically cracked PageRank?
I worked at AltaVista in 1999, when I started there they were the dominant search engine and the #4 site on the internet. They made the same mistake of taking their search engine business for granted and pursuing a bunch of other non-related features. Guess what happened? A tiny little company came out of nowhere that had clearly superior search results and completely ate AV's lunch. That company? Google.
Now Google doesn't have Rod Schrock and his Harvard B-School crew of useless cronies at the helm so they do have a chance at being successful but they'd be best off focusing their efforts on their core business.
"I mean, yeah, Profitability is somewhat of a mandatory thing (duh!) and there isn't alot of "paying" to google for it's services outside of advertising."
This is what happens to companies when they go public.
Profitability is indeed a mandatory thing for any business. As we know from Google's IPO filing, though, the text-only ads were already quite profitable.
So why change? Because for a public company, just being "profitable" isn't enough -- they now have an obligation to maximize profit.
In a private business, you can make the decision that "we could probably make more money in the short term by accepting graphical ads, but that's just not our style." In a public company you don't get to make those decisions any more -- if you try to, the shareholders throw you out and replace you with a clueless Haaaahvahd MBA with Executive-Style Hair who is more than happy to run the business into the ground to hit a quarterly revenue target.
Google's founders have attempted to mitigate this somewhat in their filing by giving themselves, essentially, super-shareholder status -- their shares carry ten times the voting weight of an average shareholder's. But that's a defensive measure; it doesn't change the fact that the underlying dynamics of the company have changed. The founders are reacting to direction from outside, now. It will be interesting to see what other "great ideas" the outsiders have up their sleeves...
Read my blog.