The leak on AdSense information
JenSense has recently postedWhat Google’s Analyst Day Slides Said About AdSense and I finally have a bit of time to comment on this very interesting bit of news.
The thing was that Google accidentally posted the notes to their slides from their Analyst Day online, which hold some very nice information. Their Form 8-K already said that AdSense margins will be squeezed, but there is a lot more information in there.
They are projecting growth from $6 billion to $9.5 billion this year, mainly because online still needs to grow. They also believe that Y! and MSN will do un-economic things to grow market share in the AdSense world, which I can believe. It’s really a play in believing that you have the better system and hence can pay more money. Why your system might be better can have a lot of different reasons. On the buy side you might get better prices for reasons that are beyond the monetary element, and on the sell side you might be able to get more per click for some reason, among others simply be only aggregating premium traffic. Then there is of course the optimization part. It will be interesting to see what the different players are doing.
The most interesting part is that “The ad network will be commoditized over time”. This is somewhere I have recently been thinking along, and will probably write more about in the future. The systems are starting to appear that will make that possible and a collected effort by different people is something that is needed in the future.
They are also expanding to print, radio, TV and direct mails, which is just logical and was to be expected. I am really expecting a lot of door opening from Google here. They are also moving more into landing page quality, which I presume they will do with the quality score and similar efforts, taking into account conversions in rankings.
The mention of new ad formats is interesting and I do know the power that brings from having developed the platform at Ligatus. The problem with all of that is that to support different ad platforms you need to have the required input. Having the distributed over an entire network that you don’t manage yourself, might get interesting, especially in the optimization itself. If a selected campaign performs very well but doesn’t have the required ad type, then it cannot run under that ad type and the performance is not important anymore. I am looking forward to seeing some more innovation on the market out there in that respect. Yahoo! is actually doing well in terms of adding images to their ads based on a topic fitting image search over their network of images. Nice solution there.
Technorati Tags: AdSense, Advertising, eCPM, Ligatus, Optimization, Ormigo, Performance Maketing