Google's big problem, info freeloaters and advertising.
I know folks love Google, I like them too, but I'm also torn on just what their end goal is these days. They make oodles on potential awareness for their customers. Its seems like one big gamble for folks these days. Google owns the search real estate so there for you must pay to be on their lawn at the right time. Yet does that placement get you the sale? I wonder.
GMail, love it, and yeah it serves up ads all day long along side my emails. In the two years i've used GMail I've never once clicked on an ad. Google sells attention space right there while I'm reading my email, yet, I never think to look over there at those ads, they aren't on my radar.
Google likes to think it knows where the radar is, it plans ahead on getting in my face, allowing anyone to widgetize their ad service, serving it up all over the web. You see it in new beta apps, social networks, blogs, you name it, odds are theres an side bar somewhere looking into the context of whatever is being discussed and then offering additional goodness in the form of ads. To me, this is all wasted. I have never clicked on a Google ad in a social network, beta app, blog space, etc etc etc. I didn't go there to click on ads, I went there to consume some information, view a movie, read a comment, participate in a discussion, yet for some reason, there's that Google guy standing in the background with that big white board on him saying, "hey I hear ya'll talking about robotic babies.. did ya know XYZ has robo babies in six colors!!?!!?" thanks man, but no and I don't care.
Where did Google go wrong? Clearly its still making money. Sure its making money but is anyone actually making money off it? Is the game just all about selling potential awareness? I thought advertising was supposed to get me closer to buying something real. I suppose they just pimp it out, and hope for the best.
They know the 900 million dollar deal to pimp out MySpace isn't going so well. Again, its bad solution for that environment, and thats what bothers me. Google isn't thinking about people any more, its not offering value, its just trying to be everywhere you go, every page you visit will have some banner space scraping text and applying a contextual formula to the discussion and serving up an ad, pimping a player to the scene who can attempt to interface with my attention that is clearly not looking at it. Epic fail.
When will Google's advertising bubble arrive? When will it have to rethink attention, figure out new ways to really captialize on how people use the web? I think they're slipping. Attention is shifting, and freeloaters are carving Google up and then some. They are like free highway of the web, no tolls, lots of data, servered up, sure they can advertise all they want but most folks just go from A to B never thinking about that side banner ad area. Least I don't.
There's a constant quest for monetization of the web these days. I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where you simply can't monetize it, and that mindset is the wrong one to have in the first place. I think it was an initial obvious play for Google to serve up adsense to people to make them think that, yeah, i can pimp you out to who ever via search, but it doesn't assure you a click, or a buy, or a won over customer. Its a great deal for Google, I still don't think its a good deal for anyone pimping key words. Unless you're simply in the biz of landing on that search radar, you pay for that landing moment.
The only time I pay attention to ads is when I go to a space where they are at, search. I expect them there. But the world is set on serving them up where ever I go, constantly getting in my face, thinking that while I'm in x tool, x app, x space, x place I'll want to click on that yummy ad over there. Highly doubtful, haven't done it yet.
I wonder if Google could tell us those facts. For the installed based of users in GMail, how many actually click on an ad in that space while reading email? Or on YouTube etc?
I think Google should spend more time figuring out how people get in and out through Google search vs all this ad awareness bs. They should be analyzing how people think, how people use spaces and less figuring out how to make that real estate seem viable to ads.
Google's about to make a few more big purchases because attention is shifting. They are seriously jealous of traffic magnets. They don't like being out of the loop of someone elses trafffic. They dislike not owning the real estate. In fact thats their business really, its not search, or ads, its real estate.
Where's attention going? Well I'd say twitter, apple iphone, facebook etc etc... And while I love them I really love them for google calendar, docs and gmail i feel like big ass freeloater on their services. I eat them up whole hog but I don't understand their other efforts. I get in, and get out and move on. I don't click on their ads in spaces I don't expect to see them. I don't go to Whole Foods to buy video games, I don't go to Blockbuster to find corn. And while Google does a good job at serving up related context, the problem remains the same for me, I didn't go there for that purpose. I went to a blog to read a post, not click on an ad.
Ads haven't evolved much either. They are still in the segmented space where you've trained the masses to think that in this part of the browser, odds are these are ads, and while they may be contextually relevant, they are still ads. They've changed shape, color, wittyness but still are ads, you are still pimping that space for anothers gain not my own. I don't look at it as benefit space. You've trained me not look at it as a benefit but as an ad.
I wonder if anyone would think 20 years from now, Google missed out on a massive global chance to be more benefical to the end user vs being the pimp they are today.
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