Google Focus on Advertising with Click to Buy and Ads for Flash Games

By Azam on October 8, 2008

Google is working even harder to maintain dominance of online ad revenue through ads on video on YouTube and in ads and ads in Flash games. Google currently owns 40% of the 40B online advertising market with Google ad word franchise and ad sense franchise dominating the search advertising market, according to post in TechCrunch. Google purchase of doubleclick allowed an important entry into display advertising and affiliate marketing. Google continues its efforts in expanding its reach in the online medium and brings advertising into the equation.

YouTube

Google aims to make money from YouTube Video through Click to Buy. YouTube has introduced new buttons at the bottom of YouTube videos that lets users click to buy the video’s for music track or any related item form video. YouTube buttons are below too download and buy from Apple’s iTunes or Amazon.com. YouTube will soon introduce other merchant partners for other types of goods, such as films, TV shows, video games, books, concert tickets and other media-related products, according to the company and in mentioned in VentureBeat post.

It’s the latest in a series of moves by YouTube’s parent, Google to make money from the video site after it purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. YouTube will make $200 million in revenue next year, according to Piper Jaffray Research, and it continues to cost a lot to maintain because of the bandwidth costs related to showing billion of videos a week.

Flash Game

Google is going after the popular flash games with casual gaming segment as easy target compared the more complex gaming industry. The Flash market itself is a fast-growing segment, with roughly 200 million games played each month for a total of billions of minutes. It’s a good way to reach younger people or those who are hard to reach because they don’t watch TV commercials anymore.

From VentureBeat

Google is initially targeting the sweet spot for its technology: games based in Adobe’s Flash platform and which run in a web browser with no download. These are free casual games that are like snacks compared to the full course meals of hardcore console or disk-based PC games. The gaming industry itself is quite large and growing could be in the target sight of Google advertising later down the road. The Yankee Group predicts the market will be worth $971.3 million by 2011.

From NYT

AdSense for Games is a product that Google has been working on for some time. In February 2007, it bought Adscape, a startup with technology meant to insert ads into video games. Google previously mentioned the service at a conference a year ago. Mr. Oestlien said it took a while to integrate Adscape into Google’s technology.

As Google grows and expands further, the business model largely remains the same as fundamental search engine of the world’s information. Google aims to be the hunter-gatherer of information for society on a global scale. In return for its effort, Google seek to profit by monetizing the digital content by putting relevant ads next to the content of interest. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has liked the company to an advertising firm.

The New York Times reports Google plans to release several other ad products in the coming weeks as well, so don’t think we’re done yet.

Michael Arrington in TechCrunch

Most people still think of Google as a search business. But what the analysts understood long ago, and the rest of us are realizing now, is that what they really want to do is organize all the world’s information, and then put ads on it.

Which is fine with me, as long as the ads are like this one. But taking a break from my favorite Flash game to watch a video ad for insurance?

Google Focus on Advertising with Click to Buy and Ads for Flash Games

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