How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web
By RANDALL STROSS | New York Times | November 20, 2005
FIVE years ago, Web advertisers were engaged in an ever-escalating competition
to grab our attention. Monkeys that asked to be punched, pop-ups that spawned
still more pop-ups, strobe effects that imparted temporary blindness - these were
legal forms of assault. The most brazen advertiser of all, hands down, was X10,
a little company hawking security cameras, whose ubiquitous "pop under"
ads were the nasty surprise discovered only when you closed a browser window in
preparation for doing something else.
Today, Web advertisers by and large have put down their weapons and sworn off
violence. They use indoor voices now. This is a remarkable change.
Thank you, Google.
Without intending to do so, the company set in motion multilateral disarmament
by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only, please. No banner ads, no
images, no animation. Just simple words, which would go either at the very top
of the page, above the search results or, alternatively, as the experiment evolved,
at the far right. These "sponsored links" had to conform to strict limits
on length and aggressiveness in punctuation and phrasing. If you wanted to claim
in your ad that you were the "best," you had to display the third-party
authority that authenticated the claim.
Google introduced these ads at the very moment when X10 ads were strewn like chewed
gum on every square of sidewalk. X10's pop-unders were accepted at mainstream
sites run by companies including Microsoft, Yahoo and The New York Times.
In a survey in mid-2001, X10's company Web site was the fourth-most visited in
the online universe, though the statistics did not distinguish between voluntary
and inadvertent visits. Its apparent success led some in the advertising industry
to publicly endorse the loathsome pop-under. Brian McAndrews, the chief executive
of the online ad agency Avenue A, was quoted in Advertising Age in 2001 as saying,
"Just because something is intrusive doesn't mean it's bad."
This was the reigning orthodoxy when Google began its idiosyncratic foray into
text-only advertising. Not everyone within Google was confident that an alternative
model would fare well, or that Google would be able to accept advertising in any
form without alienating its fans, who had enjoyed using its search service without
encountering a single advertisement on the site during its first year of operation.
Knowing that an entirely free service was not likely to last, some Google users
offered to subscribe for $10 or $20 a year, if spared exposure to commercial messages.
Google executives seriously investigated an ad-free subscription model. In the
meantime, the major online ad networks were knocking on its door, offering a turn-key
advertising service. They would supply the paying sponsors and the banner ads;
Google had only to sign on the dotted line.
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.
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. Mr. Brin and Mr. 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.)
Ms. 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. Today,
Yahoo and MSN serve up text-only ads in the same peripheral locations on the page
as Google, and use an almost identical format. Like Google, they also are fighting
the good fight against pop-ups, and forbid advertisers from linking to pages that
will bop the user in the nose. Google's model is copied for a simple reason: its
ads produce profits that prove that size does not matter.
Some analysts view Google's embrace of text as temporary, predicting that the
company will add image advertising to its site just as soon as it can build the
infrastructure. Jordan Rohan, an Internet analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said
that given the fact that Google serves up 100 million search-query results a day,
were the company to add a single photo-quality image to each page, the bits for
each page would increase a thousandfold and the resulting load would figuratively
"break the Internet."
Is Google holding off on image ads because of inadequate infrastructure? No, responds
Ms. Mayer. She says Google uses text for ads because of cognitive science: text
has the highest information density and allows users to scan a lot of information
at the highest speed, or, as she phrased it, "the bit rate on text is very
fast." Anything that gets in the way of speed-reading must go. Google does
not permit advertisers to use all-capital letters. (Studies have shown we read
those 30 percent slower than properly capitalized words.) Ms. Mayer did allow
for one theoretical exception to text ads in the future: when users search for
videos. "For a query on videos for baking a cake, then, a video might be
best," she said.
The online marketing agency Avenue A, which later became Avenue A/Razorfish, says
that about 30 percent of the more than $400 million it will spend on behalf of
its clients this year will be for text ads on search pages. Last month, Eric Schmidt,
Google's C.E.O., said the company's profits jumped sevenfold in the third quarter,
versus the period a year earlier, partly because larger companies were increasingly
willing to spend their ad dollars on search-related advertising.
TRUE, major ad buyers still spend a majority of their client's online budgets
on banners and display ads and, increasingly, on video commercials. But even in
the deployment of these formats, one can see the effects of Google's civilizing
influence: these advertisements, for the most part, eschew the strong-arm tactics
of earlier times. David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer, said, "Paid
search has brought to the fore the cliché 'the consumer is in control,'
and there is no going back."
Mr. McAndrews, the onetime defender of intrusive pop-unders, has taken note. He
is now the head of aQuantive, the parent of Avenue A/Razorfish. When reminded
last week of his past statement that intrusive-doesn't-mean-bad, Mr. McAndrews
said, "I've evolved my thinking. The key is no longer intrusiveness; today
the mantra is relevance." No ad is more relevant to a user than that linked
to a Web search, he said.
As for the scrappy X10, it survives and still advertises on the Web. In fact,
it advertises on Google. Search for "Web security camera," and you'll
see its ad. But this bears no resemblance to its old pop-unders with the leggy
female models. Today, X10 must sit quietly on the right with the other sponsored
links, dressed inconspicuously just like its neighbors in plain text.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company