Spooked By Upstart, Google Spills The Beans

By Jason Lee Miller - Mon, 02/26/2007 - 17:26

Google is set to allow advertisers to bid on where (which websites) their ads appear. The change appears to be in direct response to a New York upstart that's been siphoning a bit of the online ad business.

The top thread at TechMeme.com ballooned this afternoon as SEM bloggers, reading about this audacious upstart in the Times, stumbled upon the interesting part, quoted from Google's Kim Malone, on page 2:

In the next few months, Google’s advertiser reports will begin listing the sites where each ad runs, Ms. Malone said. She added that advertisers on the Google networks would soon be able to bid on contextual ads on particular Web sites rather than simply buying keywords that appeared across Google’s entire network.

For advertisers that care more about branding than direct sales from search engine marketing, news like that is Vivaldi in the ol' ear canal. But why was Google so quick with the me-too's? Quigo was taking away some major business with a similar model, namely, ESPN.com, FoxNews.com, and Cox Newspapers.

So what are the experts so frantically blogging about? Let's check it out.

Jennifer Slegg says:

This means that opting into the content network while having the transparency of knowing where your ads of being displayed just got easier. You will now be able to easily filter any URLs you don't want your ads showing up on (such as for competitive or quality reasons) without having to opt-out of the entire network.

From a publisher perspective, if you have good quality sites in the content network, you have nothing to worry about and a lot to gain. If you have sites that are less-than-stellar, the kinds of sites that advertisers wouldn't be so happy that their ads are appearing on, you might want to worry, or improve the quality of those sites

John Battelle says:

The key here is that in fact, Google *is* changing how it sells, and is pushing site specific and other approaches through its Adsense network. While direct response advertisers may not care about this, brand advertisers do, and it's those advertisers that Google is now going after.

Interestingly, this is the same type of model that's been used with television for a long time. The goal is to target mass audiences, even if some are still holding on to the super niche, where clicks still seem to convert better.

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