The free market (and Google) reduces pop up ads on the internet


Brought to you by free enterprise
I was wondering what had happened to all the popup ads. Turns out most people didn't like them anymore than I did. And Google capitalized on that trend.

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.

Would users approve?
But what about this would please users, who were accustomed to 100 percent commercial-free search space? Google thought, or at least hoped, that its users would appreciate that the advertisements, by design, would be matched to the content of each search. Advertisers would not be permitted to buy a block of screen real estate, as was standard practice everywhere else. They would have to narrowly define who their intended customers were, by bidding for the privilege of having their ads displayed only when a particular keyword showed up in a search. At Goggle's insistence, the ads would sit apart from the search results and be easy to ignore.

Marissa Mayer, vice president for product development at Google, recalled concerns raised during internal discussion about the likelihood of encountering advertiser resistance to such an unfamiliar format. At one point near the time of the debut, one of her colleagues leaned over and predicted, "You wait, in a month we'll be selling banners."

It did take a little while before prospective sponsors were willing to try Google's text ads, but soon enough, they attracted the intrepid. Brin and Page deliberately offered advertisers instant gratification: pull out your credit card, plunk down a $50 deposit, send in four lines--and in a blink it would be out there, having been automatically processed without a pre-publication review by a humanoid. (Google's language police would follow up later, if need be.)

Mayer credits small companies for helping to draw the attention, and ad dollars, of Google's big accounts. Because of the sheer number of commercial sites run by small operators--like the one that has bought a sponsored link tied to the unappreciated sport of extreme ironing--their customers add up to a very large number. Once upon a time, Goto, another pioneer in online ads that was renamed Overture and bought by Yahoo, thought that search result positions should be sold to the highest bidder. Bad idea. Users wanted the order of results determined by algorithm, unswayed by advertisers. That wish became the unwritten law for search.

Somebody listened to their customers, gave them what they wanted even if it didn't fit in the accepted model, and made a ton of money. All without government regulation or oversight.

*Disclaimer - This site uses Google as it's primary search engine.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sun - November 20, 2005 at 06:17 PM  Tag


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