If you’re from the U.S. and you use Google News stream to get your daily news fix. More particularly if you’re using Google News’ search engine, you’ve probably noticed that the Google News search results now display text ads side-by-side with the search results. This is of course part of Google’s experiment on exploring possible avenues for their clients’ paid ads, or perhaps it’s the companies way of making full use of its online property. Google has been implementing this ad scheme on its Google Book Search and of course on Google main search property.
Of course it is quite understandable for Google to explore these possibilities. It’s just a way of putting their dormant properties into something that would earn some amount for the company. And it is also expected that users might be appalled by this sudden change.
If you look at it closely, users who are ranting about these changes may have a point. After all Google started Google News with no ads at all. And users like it for that. Unfortunately Google failed to see the merit of the clamor of Google News Search. It’s a business move, plain and simple.
Now is the right time to think of what will be the next online property that Google would use to display its paid ads.
People will start ignoring even more the online ads. results of Eye tracking research ave proven that people look at a page scanning like an “F”.
Exactly where there are no ads.
The more ads Google stuffs, the less we will see.
Less Is More.
That’s how Google started: minimalistic and clean.
Now Google properties have has become cluttered.
I’m actually entirely in favor of it.
Google has consistently operated on the principle of hyper-relevancy, and has ongoingly made online markets more efficient. Their principles continually put the user first … what’s wrong with their expanding their reach and allowing their users to connect with relevant advertisers?
Do we forbid The New York Times from carrying advertising? Do we even suggest they are less than objective because of it?
For what it’s worth,
Glenn :-)
Glenn Livingston, Ph.D.
I had mixed views about Google deciding to advertise on Google News. After all its their property and they can choose what they want to do with it. Just when i was contemplating about this, i came across an article on http://www.empoweredseo.com/seo-internet-marketing-blog/. It has a practical and definitive approach to the matter dealt with in this article. A must read.
Recently I noticed for certain political news, google seem to pick more from fringe news networks than from networks maintained by more mainstream news papers. Could it be that google has been paid for the news preference (bias)?