Robert Scoble pinpoints a huge problem–and thus opportunity–with Google’s online advertising model.
On their Naked Conversations book blog, they finally had to remove Google advertising. Why? Because there were too many unfocused ads that appeared. Many of them inappropriate for the business market.
Robert, this isn’t just a problem with your book blog. Most of the Tablet PC sites have the same problem. In fact, I think most sites with focused editorial content have the same problem. There are just too many unfocused ads when using Google’s ad infrastructure on a focused site. That means lost revenue. It’s not just the publishers that lose out. It’s hard for the advertisers to get their ads on sites they’d like to advertise on. Why? Because large, generic ad buyers are purchasing poorly focused ads for broad exposure. Many times over half of the ads are poorly focused.
I can see where Google’s ads are a terrific lowest-common-denominator, fallback, but when you have focused content, you want focused ads. There’s a huge opportunity for someone (and I mean a huge someone, someone like Microsoft or Yahoo or even Google) to fix this.
I can see why Google probably won’t jump to fix this. Why? Because they have huge advertisers (a.k.a. their best customers) that want these broad ads. They want to buy up keywords for just about every product out there, even if they don’t really have a product that fits that market. Further, if you remove these big ad purchases, I firmly believe ad revenue will go down. The trouble is, it should. Company XYZ that understands this will win big. Increase advertising quality. Reduce costs.
Actually, the ads on naked Conversations were highly focused. They were keyed in on the word “naked.” The ads were almost entirely pornographic and that’s why we took them down. The solution would be to have a way for the ads to key on topics such as “corporate blogging,” rather than words like “Naked.”
Agreed, it would be best if you could hold the advertising content to the same level of quality that you want for your editorial content. Currently, with Google’s ads that’s not the case.