Google’s Puzzling Move
It’s no secret that Google is virtually printing money with its contextual advertising business. If you’ve read The Search you know that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally adamantly opposed to selling advertising alongside Google’s search results. It was only after Google developed a way to deliver advertising that was relevant to the context of a user’s search that Brin and Page embraced advertising as a business model.
With this in mind it’s kind of strange to notice that Google is currently running ads promoting the Da Vinci code on literally every results page, regardless of what is being searched for. Take a look at the bottom of the page, right below links to the ‘next results’.
The Da Vinci Code Quest is a series of puzzles that can be plugged into your Google home page, and of course, it’s also designed to promote the new Sony Pictures release.
So the question is, does this promotional link violate Google’s pledge to only run relevant advertising alongside search results? It could be argued that the link is also promoting a Google service (I suspect the Google home page doesn’t have nearly as many users as My Yahoo). If that was the case, however, why would the link be buried so deep on the page? It’s sort of like Google wants to experiment with non-contextual ads, but they don’t want anyone to notice.
And just how much is Sony paying for a promotion like this? They’re likely to get hundreds of millions of page views, but how many of those users will ever see the link?
It may not look like much, but that small link could represent a major shift in Google’s ‘contextual’ advertising business.
Technorati Tags: Google, Da Vinci Code, Advertising
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3 Comment(s) so far
1. Jim wrote on April 29th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Are you accusing a company that closed yesterday at $417.94 per share of selling out?!?
How dare you, sir? How dare you!!
2. Kirk wrote on April 29th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Uh, no. They sold out the day they went public (literally).
I’m noting that they’re making what seems to be a major policy change regarding ad placement.
3. Medialoper » The Weekly ‘Loper - April 30, 2006 wrote on April 30th, 2006 at 11:44 am
[...] Google’s Puzzling Move - Are those “Crack the DaVinci Code” ads at the bottom of every search results page the precursor to the decontextualization of advertising on Google? by Jim | posted in The Weekly ‘Loper Tag at del.icio.us | Incoming links [...]