How Google tamed ads on the wild, wild Web

Without intending to do so, Google set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only.
The New York Times

The story "How Google tamed ads on the wild, wild Web" published November 20, 2005 at 2:55 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[r124c41]

A picture is worth...

What I have found helpful is to imagine a thousand words sitting there in place of a picture. It really puts the whole thing in perspective -- not only because of the information provided but the amount of processing time by a human taken to understand what is being communicated...

[Queixa]

The death of the pop-ups

Fine article, and I do appreciate Google's unobtrusive ads (and frequently scan them). But I think pop-up blocking software probably had as much (or more) to do with the taming of the advertising than anything else. Also, I hope that extensions like FlashBlock will mean the death of Macromedia Flash ads. They also used to annoy the bloody batf*$# out of me.

[Don_Dodge]

Google's Gift - Text Ads

I remember 6 years ago when I was at AltaVista banner ads and flashing animated gifs were the standard for web advertising. Later pop-up ads and interstitial, ads that preceded the download of a content page, were all the rage. It seemed like every week AOL was winning $50M advances from advertisers who wanted to sponsor certain pages.

Google held the line and only allowed short text ads that were relevant to search results. This was a huge risk for Google. There were no other web sites or portals doing this, and it was not clear advertisers would agree to pay money for such low tech, brand free ads.

I mentioned in my blog post, "The Search" an insiders response" , "Google deserves a lot of credit. They did four major things right. First, the PageRank algorithm was far superior to any other ranking/relevance method, and still is. Second, their use of cheap, scalable PCs and storage put them at a serious cost advantage over everyone else. Third, their implementation of paid search (AdWords) was simple, elegant, and very effective. Fourth, and maybe most importantly, they stayed the course on focused on search, while everyone else was trying to copy AOL and become a consumer portal. Great decisions." See <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/the_search_an_i.html" target="_newWindow">http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/the_search_an_i.html</a>

Each one of these four major decisions went against conventional wisdom. AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, MSN, and AltaVista were the big players and they all did exactly the opposite of what Google did. It is hard today, five years later, to understand how critical and unconventional, these decisions were. These were not technical decisions, theses were business decisions. Larry Page and Sergei Brin are known as technical wizards, but they are very sharp business guys too.

You can read my complete post at <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/11/googles_gift_te.html" target="_newWindow">http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/11/googles_gift_te.html</a>

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Google owns the web

<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.analogstereo.com/turntable_linn_axis.htm" target="_newWindow">http://www.analogstereo.com/turntable_linn_axis.htm</a>