In a fundamental change to its core philosophy of delivering text only ads, Google today announced that it would sell animated branding advertising. For the moment, Google will not allow the rich media formats that include video, sound and interactive elements. Also, it has placed restrictions on the animation, keeping ads from repeating endlessly or flashing in a particularly distracting manner.
The aim is to make Google a much more attractive environment for band owners, For the moment Google is not selling branding ads on Google.com or any of its Web sites. The new program is just for Google's business of selling advertisements that appear on thousands of third party sites, ranging from small blogs to sites of major publishers. Those sites concerned about a potential competitive threat may choose not to participate.
Google’s charging structure is an unusual hybrid of an ad-pricing yardstick — the cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) model— that most Web publishers employ, and the cost-per-click (CPC) model that Google and other search-engine providers such as Yahoo use.
Google is providing advertisers with tools to help them search through the many thousands of sites it represents to find those that may have an audience relevant for advertisers' products. It unclear whether these tools will include an affinity index based on a site’s popularity but that’s probably only a matter of time as is the development of behavioral based targeting.
Once the advertisers have chose the websites where they want their ads to appear they name the top price they're willing to pay per 1,000 impressions. Google's system calculates which would generate more money — one display ad or a cluster of text ads from other advertisers — then display whichever has a higher potential value.
It will be very interesting to see if publishers, especially the larger ones who value their tight relationship with brand building advertiser see the new Google service as a threat or as with Google text ad AdSense program, view it as “found money” and embrace the new Google service on their sites.
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