4 ms·

Was this due to the recession or was this due to Google not conducting the right research?

mdasen 18y ago
Probably a combination of things. 1. The newspaper industry is just doing really poorly which means there is little money to be had there. So, this program, not greatly connected to Google's main business, also probably wouldn't make a lot of money. 2. Traditional ads (TV/newspaper) differ from web ads. With the web, you're trying to automatically place ads for an infinite variety of content and users. With traditional ads, you're placing one ad for every user and there's a finite amount of content. So, all of Google's techniques for web advertising have little to do with traditional ads. 3. What kind of research can you do? Like, with web ads, people can look at impression to click ratio of the ad placed next to many different content; impression to click of 100 variations of the ad; click to sale based on all those conditions. Traditional ads you really only get circumstantial evidence (ie. we ran 100 ads this week and sales went up 5%, therefore 100 ads raises sales 5% - which, clearly isn't good evidence since that change could have been caused by any number of things). Sure, sometimes they say, go to dell.com/tv-offer-8, but how many people do that rather than going to dell.com? Google's success is having computers do the work for them. They measure things analytically and mine data. Unfortunately, the traditional market isn't based on data. Rather, it's based on intuition - this ad makes our product look cool. Sometimes they back the intuition with quasi-data like focus groups, but that's not a Google thing. Google mines hard quantitative data, they don't intuit, they don't do qualitative data. I'm not saying that the others are worse, just that it isn't Google's realm and therefore it just doesn't fit Google in the way that web ads do. Google is great at a few very important things. They don't have great ideas on how to revolutionize everything. If there isn't a lot of data to analyze or something that needs a ton of computing power, Google's unlikely to have a great solution to your problem.

Probably a combination of things. 1. The newspaper industry is just doing really poorly which means there is little money to be had there. So, this program, not greatly connected to Google's main business, also probably wouldn't make a lot of money. 2. Traditional ads (TV/newspaper) differ from web ads. With the web, you're trying to automatically place ads for an infinite variety of content and users. With traditional ads, you're placing one ad for every user and there's a finite amount of content. So, all of Google's techniques for web advertising have little to do with traditional ads. 3. What kind of research can you do? Like, with web ads, people can look at impression to click ratio of the ad placed next to many different content; impression to click of 100 variations of the ad; click to sale based on all those conditions. Traditional ads you really only get circumstantial evidence (ie. we ran 100 ads this week and sales went up 5%, therefore 100 ads raises sales 5% - which, clearly isn't good evidence since that change could have been caused by any number of things). Sure, sometimes they say, go to dell.com/tv-offer-8, but how many people do that rather than going to dell.com? Google's success is having computers do the work for them. They measure things analytically and mine data. Unfortunately, the traditional market isn't based on data. Rather, it's based on intuition - this ad makes our product look cool. Sometimes they back the intuition with quasi-data like focus groups, but that's not a Google thing. Google mines hard quantitative data, they don't intuit, they don't do qualitative data. I'm not saying that the others are worse, just that it isn't Google's realm and therefore it just doesn't fit Google in the way that web ads do. Google is great at a few very important things. They don't have great ideas on how to revolutionize everything. If there isn't a lot of data to analyze or something that needs a ton of computing power, Google's unlikely to have a great solution to your problem.