Gmail And Its Optimizers May Hurt Online Publishers

[Garrett]

OK, how many times have you searched online today? Now, how many times have you checked your email? If Gmail passes through the gauntlet of privacy activists and gets the number of users it will take to provide real value to advertisers, then AdSense in Gmail will become a crucial product in the advertising mix.

So let's say your competitor buys a text ad in an e-newsletter delivered to a Gmail account. Your AdSense ads, if they're targeted towards keywords from your competitor's ads, could appear in the Gmail ad section, right beside your competitor's. (According to GoogleGuy, "you'll see ads on the right-hand side of your browser page separate from the emails themselves.")

If you open that e-newsletter right away and see what keywords your competitors are targeting you could bid on those keywords and possibly place your ads next to your competitor's.

How long will it be before potential e-marketing clickers are watching for better deals in the AdSense ads displayed beside e-newsletters?

Of course many email advertisements appear in images, so it won't work to bid on keywords that appear in the ads. However, it would work to target other keywords that appear in the content of an article (assuming there's an article), or even any of the text that appears in the email itself, such as the publisher's name.

Once Gmail's operational here's the job for your new marketing hire: read email newsletters where your competitors advertise (especially if advertisements appear in image) and pick out keywords from the content to advertise on.

Publishers, in attempts to kill competition to their advertisers, will have to publish image only emails to Gmail addresses, which will raise bandwidth costs and download time.

Here's what really bugs me though - AdSense ads on websites generate revenue both for the content provider and for Google. If a publisher, also a content provider, sends a newsletter out and Gmail places ads beside it, that publisher receives nothing.

But Garrett (you're saying to yourself), that advertiser's getting eyeballs, which Google provides through their snazzy new email service.

So, I ask you, will email publishers then drive Google's AdSense sales? I think so, especially b2b AdSense sales. Google's volume of b2b AdSense sales for Gmail will come from e-publishers and they won't have to pay a dime for the content.

In a DMNews article (http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=27075) Jupiter Analyst David Daniels pointed out another group that would potentially lose, "it would represent a conflict for marketers, meaning it would indicate that the marketer would also have to pay a premium to ensure that they owned the top contextual ad placement in order to displace potential competitors from preying on their e-mail marketing campaigns."

I digress though - if/when Gmail becomes the email of choice for email users we'll see the rise of Gmail optimizers who target soon-to-be-opened mailings from competitors and other online publishers.

Thanks to WebMasterWorld thread New Optimization SubCulture of Gmail Starting To Develop (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum100/17.htm) for the concept.

[OneMoreBite]

Am I the only one who thinks it's creepy to have my e-mails trigger advertising? I don't want my latest rant about mad cow to trigger ads for McDonalds now do I?

I suppose the logical answer is, "If you don't like it, don't use it," but what if I decide to become an advertiser? Will there be an option to opt out of having my ads served in GMail?

P.S. I was wrong about it being an April Fool's joke, so joke's on me.

Kathryn

[xmx]

I have only a personal consideration, but I think it can be the same for other persons.

Usually I look in email advertisings in safelists or ezines to find something different from search engines results, so the appeal of those adsenses will remain lower.

And an entire email or an ezine article provide many more details than a small ad.

Also when I used free web based email services I never clicked on a banner ad.

Conclusion: I think the click through in GMail will be much lower than on google and in targeted websites.

[cbp]

Conclusion: I think the click through in GMail will be much lower than on google and in targeted websites

I can't speak from any experience on this, but there was a post on another forum from someone who had noticed some hits in his logs from Gmail. He stated that there was a 2:1 conversion into sales from those hits, whereas his usual conversion was 5:1, so it appears that the highly targeted adwords in those in teh gmail beta are very effective - but he did add a disclaimer that this was based on only 2 days of data.

CBP

[ldyguique]

While I definitely have mixed feelings about GMail and their use of ad-sense, there is a strong upswelling of concern from others. Liz Figueroa, whom I first came across during all of my research on offshore outsourcing, is continuing her campaign on privacy issues. Internetnews.com (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3339451) reported:


The California senator who authored the state's Do-Not-Call legislation has serious privacy concerns about Google's proposed e-mail service.

"I believe you are embarking on a disaster of enormous proportions, for yourself, and for all of your customers," State Sen. Liz Figueroa said in a letter to the Mountain View, Calif., company.

Figueroa is working on legislation to ban the scanning of personal e-mail for advertising purposes, following the European Union's stringent consumer privacy guidelines. She hopes to have a draft within a month, and she thinks Federal authorities will take notice.

While any "new and different" approach to advertising will have its early "feeding frenzy" moment of success, will the rising concerns of consumer activists eventually overpower yet-another dot.com expoitation of people who "just wanna go online"? Banner ads had their heyday, and now, programs are being created to block them--Norton blocks both banner ads AND ad-sense. Popup/under ads were effective, until the public became so fed-up that there is a plethora of programs (including google's toolbar--an irony) to block them. Adware aka spyware was deemed an effective tradeoff to "free software," until it became so intrusive that there are any number of programs available to remove it from one's machine.

All I know is this. As a consumer, I'm tired, VERY tired of the constant barrage of advertising that assails me. It's standard practive to either "surf away" or use "mute" on my television (and, at least television advertising has a 50/50 chance of being engaging and humorous). When I check my snail mail, I stand next to the garbage can and immediately discard all that's advertising. As a policy, I never click on ad-sense or "whatever" ads. If I'm searching for a product, I search for it and go through a series of sites--MY CHOICE.

All of the internet advertising blitzes have included an intrusive anti-privacy element -- whether it's spam email, cookies, in-your-face blinking crappola, entire windows that popup, (whether within the ad itself or as a separate window,) or spyware. As I do NOT want the content in my emails to be screened for advertising potential, I will be part of any movement that would block ads in gmail, including an advocacy against using gmail.

[xmx]

Conclusion: I think the click through in GMail will be much lower than on google and in targeted websites

I can't speak from any experience on this, but there was a post on another forum from someone who had noticed some hits in his logs from Gmail. He stated that there was a 2:1 conversion into sales from those hits, whereas his usual conversion was 5:1, so it appears that the highly targeted adwords in those in teh gmail beta are very effective - but he did add a disclaimer that this was based on only 2 days of data.

CBP

It can be that when you are testing something new you try all the features available.

I think that hardly such a ratio will be a standard for adsenses in GMail when it will be provided to a wide users baseline