So it seems to me like the way google and similar companies make money is with those little advertisements related to what you search for. But can’t ad blockers like pith helment, adblock, etc. just get rid of them. If those become popular, is google toast?
Google makes most of its advertising revenue from text-based contextual ads. Although adblock, et. al. have been around for more than a decade, people typically only use them to block image and Flash-based ads, as well as popups.
However, the majority of Google’s income does not come from ad revenue. They make a lot of money selling their search server appliances, customized indexing services, GMail and Google Apps for corporations, and so forth.
That is basically the same thing as asking if Wal-Mart or Microsoft are toast. Google makes money in about a billion different ways and they do it well. They charge big money for preferred listings at the right of most searches. They also build customized search engines for use on the intranets of large corporations. The list goes on and on.
“If adblockers become popular”? They’re already popular, but Larry whatsisface isn’t likely to be sleeping on a park bench anytime soon.
Do you have a cite for that? I thought it was mostly from advertising i.e Adsense/Adwords.
No cites whatever, but I thought I read somewhere many moons ago that some web pages check that their popups or other nasties actually have appeared before they let you do anything useful. I’m certainly no web programmer but I wouldn’t have thought that check would be too difficult.
That said, if too much ad revenue is lost then more and more web pages will be booby-trapped to prevent blocking popups.
Presumably then it also wouldn’t be too difficult for the pop-up blocker writers to trick the web page into thinking that the ads had appeared… and so on…
I’ll second the request for a cite. The Wikipedia article on the company says, “Most of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported US$10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only US$112 million in licensing and other revenues.”
I use Adblock plus to remove picture and flash ads and CustomizeGoogle to remove text ads from the search page, so I’m seeing almost no ads. But that doesn’t mean Google isn’t being paid to display the ads my browser is hiding. And while ad blocking software is popular, its really only used by the minority of sophisticated web users. Believe me, Google has lobbyists and if it ever starts to hurt their bottom line, they will surely draft legislation to outlaw it.
This is why Google’s not worried. The fact is that most people, while they don’t care for advertising, aren’t inclined to go to a great effort to eliminate it. Pop up ads are annoying enough to prompt some to go for adblockers, but most people are willing to let text-ads coexist with their browsing.
Compare internet ads to TV ads. Television recording devices that let you skip ads (by fastforwarding) have been around for decades, but even now, the majority of people watch TV live, with ads, rather than record it and filter them out. On the balance, TV ads are much more costly; they cost about 1/3 of all your time watching TV, the equivalent of a few hours a week for most people. But they’re not intrusive enough for people to invest their resources in skipping them. In comparison, internet ads are much less costly. Even the worst (that aren’t obvious fraud/spyware attempts that just flood you with unstoppable popups) take only a few seconds to close, and most just sit at the sidelines and don’t directly impact your viewing at all.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you mean your extensions are downloading ads but you never see them, then that’s certainly factored into the clickthrough rate that Google advertises, and affects Google’s bottom line.
Google hasn’t gotten to where it is by throwing their weight around to get ineffective laws passed. If the online ad empire were owned by Sony, I might believe this course of action…
IMHO, Adsense ads are about as inoffensive as they come, sometimes amusing, and occasionally relevant enough for me to notice. Because of this, I set up an exception to allow them, even though I use both adblock and flashblock. I also tend to set up exceptions for the hobbyist websites I frequent, where ads are usually well targeted enough that they’re useful for me.
In general, though, I don’t think adblock is that popular. Browsers come with the ability to block obnoxious popups, and I bet that the vast majority of people don’t use anything more.
It’s amusing to note that all the Google ads at the bottom of this thread right now are for ad blocking services … .
This may be obvious but here goes:
Adwords - the little ads on the right of Google search results, only charge the owner of the advertised business if someone clicks on the ad.
Adsense - Google only pays the owner of the site displaying Adsense (and charges the advertised business as described above) if someone clicks on the ad.
Google isn’t being paid simply to display ads. They have to be clicked.
Google in the end is really an advertising company. I advertise through Google a lot, and the type and diversity of ads is pretty amazing. For me, Google won’t go bankrupt for these reasons:
I can upload a 30 second radio ad and choose from hundreds of radio stations to play it on. If I dealt with a radio station directly, I’d have to sign a long-term contract with minimum spend amounts. With Google, I can say that I just want to test the waters by spending $20 and advertise for 81 cents to reach every thousand listeners. Google will even let me split test ads (have two ads running) asking callers to call two different toll-free numbers so I can see what ad responds better. Oh, and Google supplies the toll-free lines at no additional cost to me.
As previously mentioned, I can advertise through the content network, but it goes beyond the text ads that are listed at the bottom of this post. I can display banner ads of various sizes on specific sites, and even flash ads. I have the choice of paying per 1,000 impressions or just paying when I get a click.
Given the choice to be locked into Brides.com for six months at $900 where they can’t give me any meaningful statistics, or have my banner ads appear on wedding sites on a pay-per-click basis with a wealth of management reports available to me that show me my ad performance, I’ll go for the latter. I have total control, can continually optimize the ads (dropping them from sites that give me a low conversion rate) and I can continually tweak my bids and do split-testing of both ads and landing pages to continually try and improve my click-through rate and conversion rate.
Mobile Ads - I can advertise on cell phones today through Google, and coming soon it will be location-based. What if you were walking by a donut shop, and an ad appeared telling you they had a two-for-one special?
Newspaper Ads - Yes, with Google you can advertise in the newspaper. Again, the benefit to me is that it’s a bidding process and I can just test the waters by spending a little money. I can choose from lots of newspapers with different demographics and I don’t have to with any individual paper directly, I don’t have to sign any contracts with individual papers and I get a great deal of control.
Here’s where it gets interesting… Google wants advertisers to have content that readers find interesting. So, if I am bidding on the keyword “ad blocker” and my ad and my web site are all about ad blockers, I’ll pay a lower rate than my competitor whose site is less relevant about ad blockers. In that way, Google rewards people who have more compelling content. Their goal is to have you find Google ads (at least their search ads) more relevant than ads anywhere else.
One interesting item though is that Facebook now gets more hits than Google according to Alexa.com. Facebook also sells ads, and their members specify their age, sex, and other information. So, I can go to facebook and say that I want to target my ads to middle-age liberal women in Ohio. Something I can’t do with Google.
Those people with ad blockers are less likely to buy. Sometimes people search for things they actually want to buy - in those instances the ads actually add value.
In any case, even if blockers block the ads on the right, how about sponsored links?
Looks like I was talking out of my ass on this one. I posted what I recalled reading somewhere a long time ago, but that information is either wrong or severely out-of-date.