By Fabrizia Degli Esposti on 2005/04/06
After sifting through mounds of news, views and expert opinion all revolving around the contextual ad network debate, the only thing that struck me was that no-one was talking about the human factor behind the ads and the networks they originate from.
It has been more than just rumoured for a while now that Yahoo! is starting its own contextual ad network, in direct competition to the widely known and used Google AdSense. The market has plenty of room for a competitor as Google AdSense only advertises on an estimated 200 000 websites worldwide - leaving lots of space for a worthy adversary to advertise.
The opinion and praise that I have developed for Google AdSense is very biased as I only use its network to advertise contextual ads and I also favour it for PPC. It does, however fit in perfectly, with what I seek in my day to day work schedule which is ruled by a workload that needs to be dealt with expending very little wasted time achieving it. Being extremely organised I need to know that the network I deal with on a daily basis is reliable and gives me fast and efficient service. Google gives me that. I have worked with various search engines and have walked away from 95% of them almost pulling out my already very short hair. I have not had any reason to complain with Google. That makes me stay. Therefore, I request that Yahoo! be so kind as to either follow suit or improve upon an already winning formula.
From reading what publishers, advertisers and experts have to say on the matter, it all seems to point to money and the need to know how much of the proverbial pie is being paid out to publishers. To me it seems to be the beginning of an unnecessary chain of events.
One of man's most endearing qualities is curiosity. It gets us into trouble but we love it anyway. Knowing what percentage of a payout a publisher receives will only open up a whole new can of cyber-worms. We, the curious beings that we are, will want to know more and more and more. Contextual ad networks will eventually have to show where each click originated from, which in turn will create the need to process all the information by none other than a human. At the end of the process the simple action of receiving a cheque in the mail will eventually seem rather banal and time consuming. Besides the fact that it's an unnecessary tool for your website's advertising and marketing strategy. Already being a member of a contextual ad network, you threw your right to choose out the window (no pun intended). You didn't want to spend hour upon hour trying to find advertiser's banners to fill your website's canvas. You didn't have time to.
It seems as if the knowledge of knowing what percentage of the overall figure as publishers receive somehow seems to fill us with the belief that we will be taken more seriously. It might even put some people's minds at rest - those that think that they are being taken for a ride. You will never know if you are or not unless you study the tracking information yourself. So, all that time you saved not looking for your own advertisers will be wasted scanning through reams of stats.
Just to give you an idea of the scale of the matter, the likelihood of an advertiser's ad displaying on the same website several times within a month is minimal. If, for example, said advertiser's ad is shown on 10% of Google AdSense's network that ad will appear 20 000 times. That translates into as many individual bits of information all relating to one single ad.
You may be asking why I'm bothering to mention all of this if it hasn't even been rumoured to ever happen in the near future. Simple. Recently MSN launched its own search engine, free from the organic apron strings it has held onto. While it will have to continue using Overture for its sponsored ads listings until June 2006 due to contractual obligations, its next evolutionary step would be to start a contextual ad network of its own. That will mean that three top players in the game, Google, Yahoo! and MSN, will want to get the same business. To make sure each attracts more than its neighbour, it will have to produce more of what the advertiser and publisher request. This is not a case of re-inventing the wheel but demand and supply.
Whoever decides it's time for publishers to know how much they are receiving from the contextual ad network's profit share will need to be organised and efficient! What Google, Yahoo! and MSN should be concentrating on is the creation of niche networks. Like cars, TV's, mobile/cellular phones, clothes, food, homes and everything else in life, there is no one-size-fits-all formula. Both advertisers and publishers should have the choice of contextual ad networks and be able to select which suits their specific needs best.
By the sound of things to come Yahoo! will be concentrating more on the quality of websites. Hopefully they will consider allowing the publishers to be a little more personalised with their ads and the look and feel of them.
I'm going to carry on as I have been and await the arrival of Yahoo!'s new baby into the search engine family and watch it grow. The fun is really going to start when MSN starts kicking.
