Google, DoubleClick, and You

$3.1 billion. That's how much Google is paying to get into the business of serving up display advertising on sites all over the Internet (including PC World), with its announced purchase of DoubleClick, the company that dominates that business.

If there's anything Google knows, it's how to make money with online ads. Until now, though, most of its efforts have been focused on unobtrusive, highly targeted little text ads. With the DoubleClick pickup, it's instantly a huge player in big, flashy, highly graphical ads, too. And while display ads can be carefully targeted, they're much less likely to be so, at least currently.

The acquisition--which cost Google about twice what it paid for YouTube--makes perfect sense, and while the company's official statements have been vague and open-ended enough to give the company leeway to do almost anything over time--including giving away DoubleClick's services to Web site proprietors for free--it seems a safe guess that it'll try to bring some of the targeting and optimization of its AdWords text-ad network to DoubleClick's world.

The merger will give Google even more overarching power in online advertising than it already has; it's going to have its fingers in a heckuva high percentage of the ads you see on the Web each day. That's a potentially scary prospect for everyone else in the tech industry--Google's position as an online ad company is starting to feel reminiscent of the old, monopolistic Microsoft. (Yes, I know that Microsoft's market share is still monopolistic in some key software areas; it's just that nobody's frightened of the company and its power in the way that was common in the 1990s.)

Already pundits are talking about possible competitive fallout such as Microsoft maybe deciding to snap up Yahoo--which again has me thinking of the 1990s and AOL's 1998 acquisition of Netscape. (Which was gigantic news at the time, though in retrospect it didn't help AOL or Netscape compete with the Microsoft juggernaut; actually, it had remarkably little impact on the world, period.)

But how about Google, DoubleClick, and you? I'm inclined to be an optimist that the deal will benefit those of us who practically live online. Google's been a force for good in online advertising, since it's shown that the most successful ads are the ones which are most relevant to Web users; the end result probably hasn't been fewer ads, but it's surely been fewer completely useless ones.

And while DoubleClick's very name sets off alarms in some folks' heads about tracking cookies and other means of watching where online visitors are going in order to monetize them better, I'm hopeful that Google will, if anything, impose tighter and clearer privacy policies on DoubleClick's ad network.

Also worthy of note: Since practically everything online is free, practically everything is dependent--long term, anyhow--on ad revenue. If Google helps companies figure out how to give away cool stuff via efficient and effective advertising, I'm all for it.

In other words, I can't think of anyone I'd rather have utterly dominate online advertising than Google. Your opinion may differ, and if so I'd love to hear it.

I leave you with an image that indicates something about the nature of Google's impact on advertising in the Internet era, although I'm not sure just what: I did a search for "DoubleClick" on Google, and of the three text ads that were displayed with the results, two cast DoubleClick in a decidedly bad light--they're from companies in the business of helping consumers remove its ad-tracking cookies from their computers.

Both of those anti-DoubleClick advertisers are betting that folks who Google for DoubleClick are doing so because they're unhappy with it. The relentlessly efficient AdWords engine allows Google to serve as a middleman and make money off that consumer discontent. Even though it's over something that'll soon be part of Google....

Comments

Post a comment Post a comment

0 / 1000 max characters