The latest deals involve Google providing search technology for Fox Interactive (owners of MySpace), MTV and XM Radio, in return for a share of the advertising proceeds. These partnerships allow Google to place the advertising inside sites, matching adverts to the content on the page. This strategy ensures that Google provides 'site-targeting' for it advertising along with high quality relevant results for their users.
"We are a real partner to the world's largest publishers, as well as ad agencies and advertisers," stated Google head of its advertising sales strategy, Patrick Keane, in a recent New York Sun interview.
He continued to outline an example of how these adverts placed inside sites would work and attract users.
"You could be reading an article in the New York Times on Tiger Woods' recent victory and you might actually see Google ads around that article. We match our ads to the content on that page." Mr. Keane said.
With the list of partners signing up for this scheme growing it is no surprise that further developments within the advertising offering at Google have been released. Google recently expanded on the original advert, including just 95 characters of text, to include click-to-play video and banner ads. These non intrusive forms of online advertising stick to the Google guidelines of preventing an advert interrupting a user experience, a pop-up advert being the most abused offender, with the video advert only starting after a user has clicked on it.
With Google striving to provide these partners with a profitable form of advertising that does not impact on the user's experience of a site, Keane has big plans for Google search to expand into other forms of media, as the partnership with XM Radio demonstrates.
"Our advertising platform is much broader than the flat, two-dimensional content of print, which is why we like to work with Fox, XM, and others," he outlined to The New York Sun. "We can bring the same relevancy to other forms of media like radio."
Other companies on the Google partner list are About.com, AOL, and The Times. The move by Google into partnership with these large press and broadcast companies looks set to expand their advertising revenues beyond those driven by their current search results. Something which, as Keane highlights, only accounts for 10% of web usage. Keane also outlines that around ninety percent of web usage comprises of reading and purchasing.
With Google steaming ahead, securing major deals with key players within online advertising, is there any limit to how far Google can push the boundaries of user friendly creative advertising? For the time being they seem pretty pleased. As Patrick Keane puts it:
"We're pretty comfortable where we are. We are a great conduit for publishers to syndicate through us. Our partners already have great content and we are a mechanism to tap that content."
