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Thursday, February 26, 2009

Google News With Ads

Google News in the US now shows advertisement next to certain results, like for the query iphone. (Outside the US, you can reproduce this using e.g. the hidemyass.com proxy. Careful though, HideMyAss seems to run click-based popunder ads.)

Why does Google roll these ads out now, and why didn’t they have them before? Their blog post on this doesn’t reveal much. Google in regards to their changes, including video ad overlays in Google News, says “We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike”, but they don’t tell what makes these AdWords special, if anything, and AdWords have been around for a long time. One possibility could be that Google was aiming to make their service – which shows snippets and thumbnails from articles – more non-commercial to have it be more fair use and less prone to publisher attacks*. Another possibility might be that ads don’t fit a serious news context as much as they might for certain web searches (especially product web searches), but that the recession made Google want to err on the side of profits.

[Thanks George R.!]

*Even though their use is fair even commercially, I would think.

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