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Google To Buy Radio Advertising Firm
M3rk1n_Muffl3y writes "According to the BBC Google is buying US radio advertising firm dMarc Broadcasting for an upfront payment of $102m (£58m), rising to a possible $1.14bn by 2009. Interestingly it comes soon after Robert X. Cringely's prediction that Google will soon expand into targetted TV adverts. It looks we are finally beginning to see Google's transition to mainstream media."
I had to stop advertising on the radio last year -- it was declining returns. On my last (contractually required) run of ads, I paid over US$800 per customer earned. Considering I only profited about US$100 per year off of my average customer, radio was a dead form of advertising. This is on a 50,000 watt station in a major metropolitan area. My neighbors in business who kept their ads running this year only do so out of contractual obligation (5 year contracts offered almost 50% discounts). Almost everyone else still advertising on that station is the next batch of businesses ready to fail. The ad-sales people are that convincing.
Google is probably stupid to get into this business. I don't listen to the radio anymore, and I doubt many kids half my age do anymore either -- the iPod is that strong. The frequencies used for public broadcast radio seem wasted to me -- I'd rather see them deregulated and offered for another WiFi band. More WiFi means more access to streamed content as I need it. Hell, I stream MP3s to my PDA already via my Bluetooth-enabled EDGE-bandwidth cell phone (150kbps low latency all over Chicagoland).
So what does Google know that I don't? I'm sure a lot, but I can't see them being right in this situation. Maybe they're ahead of where radio will be in 10 years -- is it possible we'll see the large radio cartels end their regime, replaced with smaller stations all over the place? Could Google perform real time contextual advertising on 5000 watt stations, targeting listenes better?
Google's advertising engines don't work well on pages with too much variety it content. I see 50,000 watt stations having the same problem -- they're targeting too many different customers (and seemingly targeting them with the same generic content on 8 different stations).
How do Google's ads translate to those without sight? Radio only works as an audio mechanism, so Google's visible advertising campaign won't work here, either.
I can see Google's future in buying a company like Clear Channel -- they own most of the billboard advertising in Chicagoland, and they are also advertising in nightclub bathrooms and on the doors of toilets in office buildings. Google can find a way to digitize these ads. Is it possible that dMarc Broadcasting does more than radio (like Clear Channel)?
If it is just radio ads, I don't see it. Wasted bandwidth for a product that can't keep up with what the current customer base needs.
Looks like EPIC is proceeding on schedule...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I was listening to an episode of This Week in Tech the other day and Leo kept mentioning someone's theory that Google's true goal is to get AdSense everywhere. This move just seems to back up that claim.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
"Google's transition to mainstream media"
No, we are seeing Google's transition to ALL media.
Think what you will of such things.
My only thought is they are trying to diversify and bring some new experienced talent into their business. Since they are ad driven, this will probably lend itself to pushing into differnet markets. i don't really see where it is going, but i imagine they have other plans for this acquisiton other than radio broadcasting...
Only thing i can think of is voice ads in podcasts...
It looks like google opened op gtalk to the other public jabber networks. It's possible to talk server-to-server now!
afaik the Bitlbee team got the heads up.Actually I think its a great idea that Google is investing in advertising beyond the web. The advertising industry as a whole is in bad need of new ideas. I don't know how many more condescending and annoying car commercials I can stand. If Google can bring a fresh approach to a stagnant industry, I think it will revive radio and other forms of advertising that are currently diminishing in returns. Hopefully they do this right and not only become bigger and more profitable, but also change the face of radio advertising to make it more effective for businesses and listeners.
Actually, you make a very valid point (maybe without realizing it).
The radio ad-sales people are some of the best I've ever met -- in every market I've been in. Is Google buying up this aggressive sales company in order to accumulate the best sales minds and personalities to use to sell AdWords and other tools to advertisers?
If you can't hire them away, buy their bosses out.
"Hell, I stream MP3s to my PDA already via my Bluetooth-enabled EDGE-bandwidth cell phone (150kbps low latency all over Chicagoland)."
Clearly, you're in touch with the same reality that all other US citizens inhabit.
Granted, not as many people listen to radio nowdays. But it's not completely dead. It's still everywhere, and everyone has access to it. Believe it or not, even having a broadband connection at home puts you in the minority, buddy.
Han shot first.
It's still everywhere, and everyone has access to it. Believe it or not, even having a broadband connection at home puts you in the minority, buddy.
Of course I am. I don't want to get into my usual anti-copyright debate today, but copyright gives the content cartels control of the media schemes use to publish content -- keeping streaming companies from being as competitive as the radio cartel.
If streamers had the ability to offer content as cheap as the radio can (in terms of paying off the content thugs), you'd better believe we'd have lobbyists trying to shut radio down and bring in more wireless bandwidth.
I read TFA, but im still not clear on how they plan on using the radio to target listeners in a way which would be different from the current advertising schemes. Obviously, when you search on google, they can use your query to deliver targeted relevant advertising results. However, with radio, the only information they have is that a quantity of people are listening to a specific frequency.
Clearly, I must be missing something. Right?
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I for one would love to see Google get into the tv advertising realm. Imagine having no commercials and just seeing a text ad in the lower right portion of your show. That would make legal issues for PVRs disappear overnight and consumers would be happy. Also, if anyone here rememebers the 'I'nteractive on DirecTv that would allow a consumer to press a button on the remote to get more information for a product. It would be like clicking on a google ad from a tv show :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/It gains the general mistrust and status of any other huge corporation. I love google, it's my gateway to the internet. I've always joked that Google==Research when doing assignments. I find it exciting and I really am happy for those involved in the immense success of Google, but on the other hand I can't help thinking that maybe it's getting too big now.
is my guess to the main reason, besides diversification of their services as to why they are doing this. podcasting is going to be here for awhile, it won't remain ad-free for very long. so they are getting into the market...
To suggest that the internet isn't mainstream only means that someone is showing their age.
Watching the Nightly News is simply a chance for me to discuss the day's events with other people. I've already read all the 'big' stories of the day by 6/7 o'clock and I usually get more details to boot.
The newspaper does a bit better, as they can dedicate more space to details and they have much more local information, but even then, I'd still rather scan two or three online articles to get a variety of viewpoints.
Because of the internet, I get a much better idea of what's really going on.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
While ads might make advertisers, stations, and Google a lot of money, I don't see how better advertisements could save radio in general. I think radio is the antithesis of recent trends for consumers to want a lot more control of their media and though media such as film and television currently don't provide a ton of control (though TiVo changed this somewhat), they also have the added benefit of good content. Yes, television is mostly crap and there are a lot of bad films, but until very recently the only legal ways to watch films and television were through the dominant mediums (the actual television, DVD, and theaters). Radio doesn't offer any uniqueness in this regard, except for talk radio.
I guess is Google can establish contextual advertising when these mediums are phasing, they could be setting themselves up as a major provider for whatever these mediums are replaced with.
Then again, I could be projecting my communities onto the larger world too much (being a software developer in the San Francisco Bay Area where iPods have been described as the closest thing we have to religion). Either way, its always interesting to watch what good does when they enter a new market.
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Google tried getting into the glossy advertising business and didn't do so well.Magazines are more than willing to sell advert space to Google, but if you RTFA I linked, few of the advertisers are finding it to be worth their money.
I suspect it is a matter of finding the right format before this takes off. Maybe Google needs to group complementary products together, or simply put fewer small ads per page.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...you're listening to WGGL, from high atop the world's tallest structure, the Google Building in beautiful downtown Pocatello, Idaho... Coming up, Stevie Jobs and The Apple String Band with their rendition of "I Did It My Way", but first a word from our sponsor, Google!
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I'll listen to the radio for any drive less than ten minutes--it's not worth the hassle to (un)plug my iPod for such short trips. Besides the little news snippets I do get from NPR help keep me from being blind to the world outside of technology. Radio isn't completely dead.
As one post suggests, perhaps the move to radio is a precursor to ads in podcasts? To take this a half-step further, these ads could easily be targeted, or work on a per d/l model--the episode I download could have different ads from your copy of the same episode.
I don't get this. The thing that makes Google ads better than most is that only those who are already interested will see them. And you only pay for the ads that generate a response in the form of a click.
That makes ads cost-effective for the advertiser and useful for the consumer. What could Google do with radio that would work like that?
Seems like you'd be stuck going the same old "listener demographics" route. Anybody have a clue how this helps them?
While I agree that iPods and other personal media players are becoming the norm, I'm 18 and I strongly disagree with the opinion that radio is becoming a dead medium. While I listen to my MiniDisc player at the gym, on the bus, etc, I still listen primarily to the radio while driving to and from work every day. Apart from the music my favorite station plays, I also find invaluable the traffic and weather reports, news, concert info and also the contests they offer. Car radios are basically the only ones I use, but when in a car (especially alone,) the radio is still an excellent broadcast medium. Many radio stations are now allowing listeners online through their websites in real time, and I believe this only enhances their listener base. Google must have some faith in this, or they wouldn't be investing with that amount of money.
Yep. Google are finally becoming a normal company. There I was living in a fantasy world and thinking that they were going to be different. It turns out that they were different to get market share, that's all. Ever heard the one about power corrupting? (OK, so it hasn't already happened, but doesn't their spidering out into so many traditional markets give people inclinations of what's to come?)
Google ads sandwiched by pay-to-play music and infotainment talk radio, sounds like a bad business model to me. But since they have tons of money to spend, what do they have to lose?
PS anything that says 'targeted' immediately brings up privacy concerns.
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It seems that Google is taking over the world... at least so far I like what they are doing. --Matt Wong
Interesting.
Do you have ad-blindness, or in this case, ad-deafness?
If the radio spectrum was gone, deregulated to increase WiFi bandwidth, would you see yourself using on-demand streaming "radio" if it was available freely and you had the right tuner for it?
To me, "broad"-casting is a dead mechanism. There are two things holding it back -- the distribution cartels don't want to change (they've invested billions in the current hardware and political arena), and the force cartel (government) is too in bed with the distribution cartels to offer any change.
This is why I prefer a free market -- it is able to change on a whim as it meets the current needs of the consumers. The regulated market is so slow to react.
Anyone who spends enough money on Google ads can tell you the first name of their sales rep at Google. You know, the person who helps you fine tune for AdSense keywords, and offers you swell deals. How about if that person, who is already also helping you with localized ad placement through AdSense, could guarantee you some airtime in your local market, as well? Or, how about making sure that people sitting in their cubes at work listening to the radio and typing in some regionally interesting search term ("pizza delivery Sterling, VA") could be shown normal AdSense ads that, for the window of time that Joe's Pizza is running broadcast ads in that ZIP code, give extra weight to his AdSense ads for localized search?
Come on, folks, there's more to this than meets the eye. And don't forget the side-band stuff that handles traditional pager traffic, too. That can be used for all sorts of exotic ad-related things.
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Somehow I think the Star Wars Imperial March would be appropriate...
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
So what does Google know that I don't?
:)
Who cares? Google doesn't know shit, they never said they did. In fact they really don't even own anything.
All Google does is downloads freely available information (crawl, spider), organizes it well (database), and quickly and freely gives the important information to people when they ask for it (search). And they use a freely available OS to run the stuff (Linux).
People simply give Google money for advertising because they have the best real estate on the web. Google is the most popular website in the world.
Google is like a closet organizer
Over 40 channels of non-stop information overload!
Streaming straight for your listening pleasure:
* Goooooogle: Listen to live search terms entered by millions of users around the world. [18 years and above]
* Geeeemail: Your own personalized channel. In lieu of viewing ad-free pages in your mail account, listen to advertisements targetted at you based upon your recently received mail. [May contain adult and disturbing content. Not advised listening in front of your family, and fiancee.]
* Boooooks: Call Google Radio and tell them which books you're interested in previewing. Selected excerpts will be read on this channel free of cost. [For legal reasons, this radio will be broadcasted from a station in far-away islands.]
* Orkuuuut: The Invite-only friends channel. You can get featured on this channel for free and get overwhelmed with 'radio scraps', but only via an invite from existing members. This channel is ad-free for now, until Google Radio comes up with a strategy to make money out of it.
Actually dMarc is actually a good fit for Google. What dMarc's RevenueSuite does for commercial broadcasters is offer an automated way to fill unsold inventory. At the end of the day the Sales office at a radio station will close the ad logs, and the RevenueSuite software will schedule their client's ads into any unsold spaces in the logs.
There's no work for the station staff, and everyone makes a few extra bucks.
That's really not dissimilar to what Adsense does.
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I await the flood of comments about how "Google is evil, they're becoming a super-mega corp, OMG!". I don't understand the sudden animosity towards Google. One day Google was the coolest thing since sliced bread, and now they're evil incarnate. Like Apple, it's cool to hate Google around here. Why? They've innovated a lot, and they're growing as a company - why is this suddenly a bad thing? Is it because of their cross over from a couple of grad students to big company?
Please enlighten me....
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
I think Google could probably improve the quality of radio ads by making them context sensitive, and as long as they have a really, really, really nice voice-2-text, they're in business. Even if the radio deal isn't that profitable, it's experience that will be invaluable for them, as they plan to jump into TV, which is the real goal, probably.
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Also a good point to note, is that with the advent of Satellite radio with no commercials, who's going to put up with radio for that much longer. If you listen to the radio more than 1 hour per day, it's probably worth it. At $15 per month, it comes out to $0.50 per day. I think that most people would gladly eat that cost for the thought of radio without commercials. I don't listen to the radio, but the reasons I stopped is because there was too many commercials, songs were repeated too much, and DJs were just as bad as the commercials. I think that Satellite radio has cleared up every reason why I don't listen to radio, and I am thinking of getting one. I wonder when the same will happen with TV. How much a month would you pay for advertisement free TV?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Google to buy chocolate factory for $1.3b this comming May. The intial idea is that with so many Americans eating chocolate, it has to be a fantastic way of advertising to so many people. Instead of just advertising on the wrappers though, Google will surely have something up their sleeve, such as advertising on the chocolate bars themselves, full text ads with edible links!
Share holders of Google are told to pay no mind to what we do with your money, and stop looking at the man behind that curtain over there!
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
I agree. The best ad-sellers come from radio.
I disagree with the idea that radio is dead. Talk radio in the Boston Metro area is stronger than ever, and there are two stations in particular that get a decent penny for ad minutes (AM 1060, news and traffic, and AM 850, sports talk.)
Although, local radio stations are all running their own ads taking a not-so-subtle jab at satellite radio...
*starts remembering Private Parts* Google does seem pretty intent on gradually edging it's way into advertising throughout all forms of media. If they can manage to partner with TW (Unlikely w/ Time Warner liking their vast control), it would be a welcome thing to me, because I for one am sick of ads for female hygine products during non-feminine entertainment (I think Adult Swim/Cartoon Network has had a few).....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I savour every dewdrop of news I can find on Google aquisitions, and especially their bold plans to bring more contextually relevant advertisting to both my desktop, car stereo, and hopefully soon TV.
In just 10 years, if I'm lucky, I'll never have to think about a purchase again, as some 10 hectare cluster of Linux boxes buried under the Siberian tundra already has that stitched up. Perhaps we'll even have Meteorological Adsense! What do people buy on rainy days anyway? Why does your spleen hurt, just subscribe your spleen to the NHS Endorsed Google Body Bank and enter your query.
Making decisions is so hard these days, what, with all the options and all. Clean it all up for us Google, get rid of all those unsettling surprises, questions and dissonant irrelevancies. Give us a Google Earth.
"So what does Google know that I don't? I'm sure a lot, but I can't see them being right in this situation."
Because some blowhard on a web board clearly knows more about delivering content than Google and the reams of professionals they have.
The arrogance...
Sorry, there's nothing you can say that will convince me you know more than the people Google has, and why you would think otherwise is a testament to your own self-importance.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
They claimed they purchased the company mostly for the Sales people, as opposed to the products.
There are a lot of opportunities for radio-like services. Selling ads in podcasts comes to mind.
Here's the thing though -- no "broadcast" format is good for the new form of contextual user-desired advertising that AdSense is moving towards. AdSense isn't just about being contextually accurate with the website you're visiting, I believe that this year they'll also tie in the browsing user's habits to create truly two-way contextual ads. You can't do this when you're broadcasting to 5 million people.
Streaming on-demand music and voice has to happen. Podcasting is nice and all, but wireless "podcasting" would utterly destroy radio (satellite or public airwaves). It can be done, and done cheaply, if we deregulate much of the currently inefficiently used spectrum.
How do you dictate if spectrum is efficiently used? If the advertising dollars go up with time, not down. The deals in radio advertising now are cheaper than anytime in my history of advertising (13 years).
In the course of my job I've spoken to quite a few small/medium business owners (all of whom had some online presence) in the last year or so and in the course of conversation quite have few have said that the biggest danger they see to their businesses is not the shop up the road, or even another website, it's Google.
Google has defacto a stranglehold on the internet. Not just advertising, but as by far the largest search engine it also controls the flow of traffic. They also have a history of taking punitive (some would say childish) action against sites (eg CNet) for no reason other than they felt like it. A scary situation when there is no legal recourse and your business relies on web traffic.
Google buying up offline ad businesses is a BAD thing. They sold their "do no evil" spiel to a huge swathe of geeks based on them having no ads for the first two years of their existence and a "kooky" image; now they have advertising coming out of their ears and a squadron of lawyers, but the same people still believe them.
They are scarier than Microsoft as MS has no ambitions outside PCs and Consoles (plus they give a shitload of money away to charity). Google wants to rule the world, pure and simple. They might well cause the first proper regulation of the internet in a few years, when everybody uses it for everything; no government can allow one company to have that much power.
Before continuing I should note that I was one of those who (incorrectly) predicted Amazon.Com's demise. Amazon was (is?) carrying $2 billion in junk bond debt. I could not see how they could ever crawl out of that hole. Clearly I was wrong. Looking at Amazon now I see four things:
A direct retailer of books, electronics and other products.
A software company that sells its software and infrastructure to support other vendors retailing.
An internet infrastructure company that can sell time on its computer network "farms" and bandwidth pipes.
A huge "bricks and mortar" distribution chain for books and other products. This distribution chain can also be "rented" in part to support other vendors.
When you compare Amazon and Google, you can see how weak Google really is. While Amazon is very much a software company, Google is rapidly becoming nothing more than an advertising/media company. However, the problem that Google has is that their business model is easily subject to attack by competitors. While Amazon has a difficult to replicate business because of the cost of it's infrastructure (software, internet and bricks and mortar distribution) Google pretty much has one thing: it's search engine. The search engine is under attack by Amazon (with their A9 search engine) and Microsoft, among others. The only real defense Google has is slightly better results and force of habbit (I use Google because I'm used to using Google). Right now Google has a big pool of cash from the stock market. But they remain vulnerable to competitors and they have no other revinue stream to fall back on.
Google seems to be attempting to take their pool of cash and diversify deeper into media and advertising. Presumably the objective is to give them a revinue stream like Amazon's, that cannot be easily attacked. But this evolution takes Google farther from being the leading edge technology software company that many Googlistas still seem to think they are.
Having been very wrong about Amazon, I fear making any predictions about Google's future. But it is tempting to say that they are following an Internet model where everything happens faster. In their case the rise to bloated egos beleiving their own press ("we're all brilliant") to business decline as their revinue growth stagnates and their attempt at expansion gets mired in the difficulty of expanding into advertising and media.
Finally someone who gets it...
Google's big competitive advantage is its knowledge of trends and use of the market as a pricing mechanism. AdWord prices should be close to the "perfect" price, since advertisers compete for the ad spots.
The "Google way" will improve the margins on radio too. Radio ad rates are mostly determined by ratings -- more eyeballs, more $$$. Realtime adsense-style auctions would render the problems with the ratings system irrelevant and allow advertisers to evaluate what spots are worth how much money.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Google IS an advertizing company. It's goal is not to provide cool webmail programs, satelite map programs, or any other free/oss/whatever cool crap. It will only do so to hang on to it's user base. As soon as webmail doesn't do anything for advertizing dollars Google will leave it to die. Same for any other cool tech that people worship Google over.
Let's face it people, Google doesn't care about anything unless it will help/hinder their ad sales. PERIOD. Just remember, when you use Google every byte of legally trackable data is stored and will be exploited to generate $$$ for Google's stockholders. Not that that's evil or anything. It's just the truth.
I think the RIAA should stay out the telephone companies in the first place. now that yahoo has bought up all the darknets, there is little use for a traditional internet once Microsoft rolls out Net 2.0. Hollywood has been head of the movie industry too long and now that i can install Umbuto on my Treo, I won't be looking at another crappy Ipod.
They clean these walls to stop my pen but the bathroom poet strikes again!
Google buys life, the universe, AND everything.
free ipods
I agree, I think. In my local area at least, the only reason to watch television journalism is to get additional moving pictures of certain events. Anything resembling journalism is dismal. Nightly news contains a few facts combined with large amounts of subjective speculation (stated as fact or near to it), and much self-glamorisation of the journalists who spend a lot of time exagerrating their own importance.
There are a couple of radio shows I enjoy that discuss news and events in a much more objective context without the self-hype, and I like newspapers that publish people's letters, simply because it makes it easier to identify which issues are contriversial and what some of the other views happen to be. In effect, this is also how the Internet tends to work. Even though it's necessary to be cautious of information sources, at least the sources are there, and it's clearer what the different sides of an argument are.
Chicagoland radio is horrible, and getting worse. Thankfully, I only have to work in that area, I commute from a good distance away where there are a handful of decent, small, locally owned radio stations worth listening to. I can understand why you'd pull your advertising from the Chicagoland market... People like me would NEVER hear it.
Google is probably buying this corp for their contacts and expertise in advertising outside of the "virtual" arena. Makes a bit of sense, really. Why start from the ground and build up, when you can afford to buy someone/some company already established in the industry?
What will Google do with this new talent/resouce? Couldn't even begin to speculate. Maybe sell beagles on the black market, or something.
People seem to be ignoring the fact that text ads are possible over the radio. A lot of local stations are not starting to pipe the name of the song/artist in addition to just the name of the radio, this gets displayed on the head unit of the car. As new cars start getting nicer head units with larger LED displays, what stops Google from using this space as a text ad? When people look down to see the name of the song, they get exposed to the name of a local pizza parlor. "Ah! Pizza! What a great idea! I want some now"
Here's my hypothesis.
.com/.net/.org bomb. http://lawyers.boise.id.us/ not www.werelawyersinidaho.com.
There are two ways to target ads as far as google appears to be concerned initially. The first is search (duh) and the second is locality (almost a duh, see google local, maps, etc). Google's answer to the first is up and running - index everything, then advertise to index users based on their criteria.
The second answer appears to be to group the index users by locality then tailor advertising to that group. If there were oodles of money in my pocket, here is what I would do:
1) Lobby to promote DNS names by locality instead of one lump
2) If 1 is not possible due to not having enough influence, create our own network where we can identify users by region more effectively.
3) go back and hit 1 again after enough clout has accumulated.
3) Give access to our new network away for cost to operate and not much more.
4) Now we can monitor & tailor searches by region. Watch for volume and patterns in the searching and perform targeted advertising through more channels specific to this locale.
5) promote radio advertising based on our regional search data.
voila. now googling for lawyers in idaho yields useful results which are different from the same in florida. More paying advertisers, more happy index users.
I would guess they believe there is money between the generalization of advertising we are currently subjected to and information we actually need: Is anyone else sick of computer training and gold advertisements on CNN spewed day in, day out (office has projection tv's on in the cafeteria).
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Another take on this could be that the Google Founders are using their market cap for good, by just controlling more of the advertising space.
For instance, recently Dean had a billboard all paid for and the contract signed, and it basically just said some republican congressman should focus on winning iraq instead of name-calling murtha/cleland/gore/etc. The ad was refused and the contract canceled, with no reason given other than the company just didn't want to put it up. Who knew it was legal/ethical/moral to accept swift boat style ads but reject fairly non-contentious ads from democrats? I wonder what radio ads have been rejected like this?
So as far as I'm concerned, the more google ads the better... err wiat a minute... well maybe they'll replace them with TTD radio ads that are easy to ignore.
I don't listen to the radio anymore, and I doubt many kids half my age do anymore either -- the iPod is that strong.
Problem is that too many public school systems reserve the right to confiscate any digital music player brought onto school property or onto a school bus.
Also a good point to note, is that with the advent of Satellite radio with no commercials, who's going to put up with radio for that much longer.
,particularly if they're already paying Howard Stern millions upon millions. You don't think other radio personalities won't want a piece of the pie ?
Exactly how much longer do you think Satellite radio will be commercial free? Cable started out the same way and now the only channels that are any different than over-the-air channels are the pure premium channels.
Satellite radio will surely go to this model
Trust me, it's only a matter of time.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Satellite radio has poor audio quality. If you're willing to pay $15/m for that, then I see the marketing beast has already eaten you. Personally I listen to public radio (news, chamber music, Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion) anytime I'm in the car. If I wanted pay for music, I buy CDs, encode them to a suitable format (FLAC, Musepack, AAC LC, MP3) depending on target, and listen to that. It's cheaper, it has better audio quality, and I'm not constrained by programming.
Notice these results are local to you.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Umm you mean adwords. Adsense is for content providers, adwords is for advertisers
I use "both" of them. They're really just two faces of the same engine, so the truth is I tend to conflate them when I talk, in general terms, about Google as an advertising vehicle. I should just say "Google Ads" and be done with it. The two different back ends (facing the advertiser, and facing the publisher) are just suited to their appropriate audiences - and I actually find it a little frustrating that Google gave them two different names. Unless, of course, they're thinking that one day they might use one or the other as a conduit for tied-in services they're not directly running. Who knows. Thanks for the correction, but I hope you'll still understand my point.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
What is dead is traditional advertising. The younger generation who has grown up with a barrage of ads everywhere have become desensitized to them. Perhaps Google has some ideas up their sleeve to revive the industry?
How did a comment that long get first post?
The FP'er is a karma whoring subscriber who gets a preview of upcoming articles so he can pre-write his comments.
He's a nutcase, I hear.
It looks we are finally beginning to see Google's transition to mainstream media.
What it really looks like is our editors are not, you know editing the posts.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
One should also take into consideration that Google has such an effect on the market that they enter that they alone could make a large impact. Whether a market is dieing or not, someone at Google has an idea of where this could go.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
How long do you think satellite radio will stay commercial free? Someday they'll realize they can make more money with ads AND paying subscribers. Just like cable.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Just wondering - Is this a way for them to get into the audio advert market, but for google talk? I could easily see them releasing a 'professional' version of the GT service (no ads), as well as a 'free' version which has contextual radio ads every minute for 10 seconds? Surely the technology behind adwords would work here with some speech recognition software converting the previous minute's conversation into words, and matching them against the keywords associated with the radio ads.. Naturally all the speech2text data could be added to the google brain as part of their AI effort..
my sig might not be as funny as yours, but at least it's honest!
If you think of Google as an advertising firm then buying their way into radio makes perfect sense. Big add campaigns typically don't restrict themselves to one media form. They are coordinated campaigns utilizing most if all media outlets in order to get their message repeatedly to the widest possible audience. If Google only does online advertising they will remain a small player in such high value campaigns. If they can offer advertisements across the media spectrum then they can offer package deals where they manage such campaigns for companies which could bring them a lot of revenue.
You hit the nail on the head.
It's not like google is out to change the world of radio advertising, they just want to dip into an incredible revenue stream.
Or maybe while scanning all those old books from around the world google found that in its ancient origin, "evil" can never apply to anything they do.
What I see as the final result of this haphazard google investment strategy is the formation of the largest adware company in the history of the world. I think the money's gotten to those two... :(
Maybe, just maybe they're hopping they can use the radio stations for very wi-fi.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
For my money, the logic here is that Adsense is solely for visual media. Podcasting and online radio in general are hot tips just now, and not well served by the existing Adsense model.
When a large company wants to enter a new arena, there's a tendency for them to simply buy a smaller company already specialising in that area. (MS and that AV company, Google and Picasa etc.)
If you were Google, and felt it was time to move into advertising on podcasts and their ilk, I suspect you'd go and buy a company who've spent a long time learning how to effectively deliver advertising via an audio medium.
fortune -o
Exactly. Cable started out just this way with people saying the same thing: Content without nasty adverts. Now cable is not much different than broadcast. Sat radio will follow the same route because in the end, it is a revenue stream for profit seeking corporations, not some utopian media experiment...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I can already listen Google ads with the imperial march behind.
Google is EVIIIIIIiiiLLL!!
then they will start missing revenue forecasts just like another huge, dumb software company that has too much money in the bank and no idea what to do with it. Then investors who are still waiting for their 5x pop will slap their foreheads and say "Ah! I could've had a V8."
Google may have built a better mousetrap for the time being, but they are a fool's play (lowercase "f" for you true Fools) because there is nothing disruptive about what they do, and at the end of the day, people are still annoyed by 99.999% of all advertising.
GOOG sure is great for day trading though!
Mwuh.
And wave radio can be poor when you are far from the broadcasting station. For me an iPod and adapter/broadcaster or satellite radio are a must for any road trip or boating excursion. I wouldn't pay for it if I listened at my home, or only in my local area, but for driving and for things away from land and/or civilization satellite radio is a god-send.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
... MS has no ambitions outside PCs and Consoles (plus they give a shitload of money away to charity)...
Yes, they give a lot of money to charity. Good for them, because not everyone does. But, how impressive is it, really? If you have a monopoly on "business air" you can afford to be charitable, especially when you can get two-fers through well-targeted donations.
....about bell south and optimized throughput for the extortion payers. The streaming content industry is about to get *nailed* and nailed hard and will be in transition. It's still the wild wild west for the most part but the major telcos want a BIG piece of that lucrative pie for being middlemen. I would be wary about the internet and fat streaming content for the next year until we see how it shakes out. The telcos are NOT going to give up when there's billions at stake and THEY OWN THE PIPES. If no big guys want to play, they'll just come up with their own content. People say the'll boycott, I say BS, they'll pay the extra because they won't want to do without the net. Just like you can see there's barely a ripple in sonys bottom line over the rootkit and calls for boycotting. Maybe 1% boycotted. yawn.... they are so worried..not.
With that said, I'll give you an observation. This is *very* general, and I won't discount anyones personal anecdotals to the contrary on slashdot, they obviously exist,so I'm not looking for any from any indignant trollish young 'uns response, this is very non specific and generalized but it's true facts. Here goes.
More iPod addiction and music listening = a more dumbed down electorate. Real dumbed down. Beyond veg. Bread and circuses action to complete the brainwashing the public indoctrination centers and forced ritalin drugging have started.. More music addiction,football and nascar and videogames and movies and etc = less time to even be exposed to politics and news beyond 30 second sound bite headlines. the pigs love this! it's exactly what they want! And they get the serfs to PAY for the privele3ge of getting brainweashed and dumbed down! This is so the PTB can complete their globalist fascist pig takeovers, one world government, master/serf society. Don't laugh, it's coming..
On the other hand, talk radio with adults listening is still a great medium, and ads there tend to work well. It depends on your product, medium and genre of medium. if one is wrong, it's a waste of cash. Ads targeted to "party on d00d!" level listeners and you are trying to sell to people who mostly only care about a few trivial things, and they drop most of their disposable income on fast food, booze, drugs, ricer equipment and the latest fashion, and like getting tats and stuff. If you sell that stuff, fine, anything else, SOL. Basically inconsequential stuff they think will be important forever. For some it is, so I giuve you the current state of US society and politics. And don't get me wrong, this bread and circuses formula has been going on a long, long time, from old roman times to my generation as well as the newest set of victims, the iPod generation, and it SHOWS with our current reality and how much CRAP the corporate government gets away with.
Over the years I quit frying my brain, gee, things got clearer. Stopped being addicted to popular music, gee, thing got clearer. Stopped being addicted to professional team sports, gee, things got clearer. And stopping those addictions, and realising they were addictions, resulted in me keeping more cash in my pocket and not transferring it to these corporate crooks, leaving it for more productive purposes, and it also freed up a lot of my time to really LOOK at what was going on in the nation and world. The day is only 24 hours long, spend the bulk of it in some downbeat daze or memorizing your latest teams scores and stats or advancing to the next level in blood and guts meets swampthing game..well..that's what happens. That's what is important to you. If you are trying to sell to those folks, still in that level of growing up, well...you better stay on top of trends and fads and don't be dissapointed when you realise they blow most of their money on crap, leaving you and your product out of sight for the most part. Just because you might stream your ads over some net stream isn't going to change a thing. And the economy is this close to seriously unraveling, things that aren't essentials are going to have to drop in price severely to continue to be sold at all for the most part. Once the iranian wing of the 100 years "terror" war gets started will signal the start of the big drop and global social re arrangement. Real soon now.
I am betting that Google plans to use some secret voice recognition technology and that, for example, if Howard Stern is talking about breasts, then a Hooters add may appear during the next commercial. If a gardening show is on, then lawn care products may appear. This is obvious different from advertising today where an ad is set months before. Google's servers would store the ads and decide when they are played. My feeling is that Google will test on radio first and then quickly roll this out on TV. Advertising will become more relevant. No more tampon commercials during 24!
www.IBuyMacs.com
Used car dealership ads--powered by Google!
Yeah, I have to pay to listen to my satellite radio, but the lack of advertising alone is worth it in my opinion.
What if Google were to take a radio network and turn it into a WiFi network mmmmmmmmm now wouldn't that work with the google highspeed people are talking about?
*Shines flashlight in your face Oh, wait, I see... Some people are ready to hate Google, others are just becoming leery and cautious. Google's been great but we need to keep an eye on her, just like all other companies. (Distrust everyone big and powerful: people, corporations, and governments) I think Apple is MUCH better than M$, but some people think that means Apple is perfect, which irritates others who in their haste to remind Apple users of their faults devolve into flaming just as fast as their targets begin Job-worshipping. I dislike M$'s business practices and products, but am happy that they take stupid people's money and give it away to charity (I only wish they weren't so keen on crushing competition), Apple is nice but superfical, expensive, and too full of itself sometimes (Windows users are usually ignorant, and Mac users are elitist snobs), and Linux is my favorite, but still pretty geeky and less-than-easy or standardized (and Linux users are /.ers -good and bad). But oh my the computing field is interesting, I can't wait to see what it's like in 10 years.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Maybe Microsoft should do this as well. They already buy fake reports from Gartnet, Veritest and long time lacky IDC and they own the reviews of ZDNet. It seems that they could do better advertising in house with movie maker than with their current company.
Instead of countering every unfounded assertion in this post, I suggest readers instead perform a simple search on the estimated sale value of a major metropolitan station. Or compare radio listenership against web stream statistics. Or satellite. Like the product or not, radio continues to make obscene amounts of money based solely on listenership numbers generating ad revenue. Sales reps at top stations draw hundreds of thousand in commissions annually on millions in sales. The three properties in the ~million population market where I work expect about $40 mill in revenue for 2005. dada21's unsatisfactory experience (with a low-end AM station) isn't unusual but it's far from typical. Radio is as dead as BSD.
Google is already involved in television. They are involved in a cable channel called Current TV, in that they have a show on that channel called Google Current.
The basic principle, as far as I can tell, for the show is that the stories are chosen not on what some news editor thinks is news, but instead the topics are chosen based on information about which Google queries are most popular. (Kind of based on Google Zeitgeist.)
For what it's worth, another notable feature of Current TV is that supposedly 1/3 of their programming is produced by viewers rather than the network. This turns the traditional TV model (where networks produce content, and viewers do nothing but consume, i.e. purely one-way communication) on its ear. It's not quite like the Internet where almost anyone can self-publish almost anything, but it is an interesting twist on things.
Google is just trying to grab a piece of the huge advertising pie out there. They have experimented with selling magazine ads for their advertisers and now trying radio. I don't think either of these two mediums are that effective compared to search engine advertising which can be better targeted. Radio is becoming too fragmented and losing audiences to satellite and iPods.
As founder of http://www.developeradvantage.com/ I may be a bit biased, but anything with audio is hot right now. The basic infrastructure is in place and growing, iPods rule, and satellite radio is taking off (Howard Stern recently moved there). This is a great way for Google to acquire people with expertise in the audio medium.
Also, I believe their targetted ads fit very well with the radio medium. They know what content is being played, at least what type of content, so they can easily provide complimentary ads. Also, with satellite radio, the stations will only get more specialized, making it easier for Google to provide relevant ads.
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It would require a box at the radio station, but you could scan for keywords in the radio show as it airs, then use Google's existing keyword matching system to select an ad to play. This has the benefit that your ad will be placed where people were talking about your product or industry within the past 15 minutes. This would be huge in talk radio.
I don't know how many stations would be willing to have an adserver at the station though.
Well, you bring up a great point, perhaps without realizing it. You said "Hell, I stream MP3s to my PDA already via my Bluetooth-enabled EDGE-bandwidth cell phone (150kbps low latency all over Chicagoland)." Maybe the use of radio is for reaching those millions of people who are NOT tech savvy. Wouldn't that be the perfect medium to reach those people? Well, perhaps TV is the best, but radio is much cheaper than TV. How valuable would it be to have Google be the number 1 name that people learn as they dip their toe in the internet world. In that regard, they could have a similar affect that AOL had in the late 90's with non-tech types.
Maybe it's because I'm involved in making an open source radio playout/automation system (http://livesupport.campware.org/ but something tells me Google's interest isn't just in the ad distribution part of dMarc's holdings. Playout/automation systems are in many ways similar to content management systems, and that's an area where Google already has made significant inroads, and it's probably looking to leverage what it already knows. dMarc's ScottSystems is an outstanding playout/automation tool for radio stations, so here's how it seems to fit: 1) Ad buyer buys radio spots through Google 2) Using an AdSense-like mechanism, Google places ads on relevant stations 3) Using the ScottSystems playout/automation instances already in place, the ads are automatically inserted.
yes, it's true - just as a lot of us have become accustomed to internet ads and hardly even look at them - whereas ads on a google search are actually useful (though a lot of the time I still ignore them and just go to pages directly from the search results). I'm happy that Google is making money and diversifying though. I dont know why they have such a nice brand image, but I actually like them. I for one welcome our not-so-new multi-media overlords >_>
And if Google doesnt have some ideas, then I dont breathe
which is totally what she said
Have you tried last.fm?
There was already one poster here who replaces DJ's at his parties by letting the audience select the music from his extensive collection on hard disk via a GUI. Except for copyright (and possibly security) problems, there's no reason why he couldn't also let people plug in their portable music collections via USB, have the computer make a statistical analysis of the data, and then play a representative selection of music from the audience's collection.
This of course opens up a whole new frontier for trolling ("Uggh! Who brought that music!"). And subliminal advertising. Lots of new societal ramifications...
I'm starting to get the uneasy feeling that Google may be the anti-christ.
Just a theory.
Almost everyone I know who watches "24" is female.