It seems like every week we hear about more things Google is trying to sink its teeth into. This week, Google has announced plans to take the fight with Yahoo! over display ads to the next level, and also wooed the news industry with an experimental viewer.
Image courtesy of laptopical.com
Whether it’s an ambitious plan to digitize millions of books (the legality of which is currently being fought in court), a voice service that runs your telephones, developing ChromeOS to rival the Windows/Apple/Random Linux Flavor triumverate, or building a secret stockpile of internet stats, Google has seemed to be continuously moving into new markets and acquiring new technologies. The latest attack will be a frontal assault on Yahoo!, the current leader in display ads, for supremacy.
Google has long been the king of text ads, but revenue in that department has slowed in recent times. Seeing that the money is in larger ads that can display pictures, Google spent 3.1 billion dollars to acquire DoubleClick, an ad company featuring a method of selling ads called an “ad exchange”. Basically, advertisers can automatically bid certain amounts for pageviews that meet certain criteria, be that criteria collected information about the user or something as simple as time of day. And just like that, you have placed your ad in as targeted a space as you have specified for a price you specified. Sounds like a good deal. Yahoo! has an ad exchange too (Right Media), and while it’s estimated only 10-15% of display ads are sold this way it is seen as the future of the industry. Yahoo! has welcomed the challenge, and they have plenty of time to work against Google now that Microsoft is handling most of the searching issues oh Yahoo!. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
