One of the many qualities of Google, is the ability to search for sites and not be mislead, bothered or otherwise distracted by advertisements. In a move to satisfy investors, Google confirmed they will be implementing ads in search results.
Shawn Christopher tweeted, “Time to look for a new search engine […] I REALLY hate ads on things.” This totally summed up my thoughts in less than 140 characters.
Ads are not the enemy. Let me just make that clear before I go into yet another diatribe about advertising. I am completely content with companies monetizing services, heck, I don’t mind paying for them, but when ads visually distract people and literally just waste bandwidth, and offer no opt-out, it hurts me.
Google used to be the king of innovation and encouraged creativity, but decisions like this shows us who they are: another Internet company looking to sell ad inventory. It’s not like we haven’t heard of those before, have we?
What about creative and innovative sponsorship campaigns? I’m no advertising genius, but it wouldn’t be too intrusive to create a variety of Coke-themed homepage skins and promote changing homepage skins and let people get a nice red and black coke-themed Google experience.
Contextual text advertising works fine. I’m not nearly as bothered by text advertising as I am about graphical advertising. While text ads don’t jump out and blink and subliminally make me click them, I am more likely to act on a text ad that meets my needs. You see, Google did a decent job turning the Internet advertising industry on its head and running with it.
I don’t dispute that text ads are more susceptible to click fraud, but what isn’t? Text ads have also been losing some steam in terms of ROI, but that’s only because it was pushed down people’s throats by irresponsible publishers (Splogs). Clearly, that’s a turn-off for any Web surfer.
I sincerely hope Google doesn’t turn into what I illustrate below. In any case, i strongly advocate to surfers to use Mozilla Firefox + Adblock Plus to block ads on the internet.
The future of Google? Let’s hope not.
