One of Google's gifts to the Internet is text ads. Randall Stross of the New York times has an interesting column today, "How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web". 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.
The New York Times article says "Without intending to do so, the company set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only, please. No banner ads, no images, no animation. Just simple words, which would go either at the very top of the page, above the search results or, alternatively, as the experiment evolved, at the far right. These "sponsored links" had to conform to strict limits on length and aggressiveness in punctuation and phrasing. If you wanted to claim in your ad that you were the "best," you had to display the third-party authority that authenticated the claim.
Knowing that an entirely free service was not likely to last, some Google users offered to subscribe for $10 or $20 a year, if spared exposure to commercial messages. Google executives seriously investigated an ad-free subscription model. In the meantime, the major online ad networks were knocking on its door, offering a turn-key advertising service. They would supply the paying sponsors and the banner ads; Google had only to sign on the dotted line.
Sergei Brin and Larry Page, the Google co-founders, were more receptive to internal suggestions that could not be found in a marketing textbook - like text-only ads. These could be created by a business of any size; the format would permit a business to try out hundreds, even thousands, of variations, statistically measure the results and see which ones drew clicks and which did not. This would please advertisers."
It must have been tempting to sign big deals with the advertising networks like all the other portals were doing. But Google stuck to their principles, and it paid off big time. Thank you Google!
As I mentioned in an earlier 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."
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.
Look for Google to continue to do things in an unconventional way. They will not copy the big players, and will innovate with both technology and business models.
Agreed... their ability to be counterintuitive is what is most impressive about Google.
Posted by: Robert Young | November 22, 2005 at 09:33 AM