If Google was to reward you for sending specific ads with your emails or blog posts or instant messages or forum posts to your friends and acquaintances, would you? Consider that the reward could be money, it could be a credit of some type, or it could be “an increased reputation ranking.”
If you are an advertiser, would you want your ads to be distributed in a manner like this?
Might metrics gathered from the effectiveness of User Distributed Ads (UDA) be used for “later ad serving arbitration?”
A series of patent applications from Google describes ways that people might send advertisements and search results to people they know via mail and messaging and blogging and forum posting, receiving rewards in return for doing so.
I wrote about User Distributed Search from Google June, in a post titled Google’s User Distributed Search Results in Emails, IMs, Blogger, and break down how that works in a somewhat lengthy post. The following patent applications expand a little upon how these concepts would work together
- Facilitating manual user selection of one or more ads for insertion into a document to be made available to another user or users (20070198921)
- User Distributed Search Results (20070198500)
- Advertiser interface for entering user distributed advertisement-enabled advertisement information (20070198344)
- Assessing advertiser charges for manual user insertion of one or more ads into a document to be made available to another user or users, for distribution of such documents and/or for user actions on such distributed ads (20070198343)
- Providing rewards for manual user insertion of one or more ads into a document to be made available to another user or users, for distribution of such documents, and/or for user actions on such distributed ads (20070198342)
- User distributed search results (20070198340)
Some nice examples in there, like being the owner of a bookclub newsletter, and performing a search and inserting it within your email along with advertisements, and getting “rewards” based upon recipients of that email clicking on that link. Here are a couple of approaches to something like that from one of the patent applications:
[0120] Consider, for example, a user that sends an email to members of her book club informing the members of what next month’s book is. Suppose that the user has manually inserted into the email “results” such as an image of the book cover, a UDS search result to a review of the book, and a normal amazon.com search result. When the recipients of this email open it, side-bar, content-relevant ads might also be provided. Such side-bar, content-relevant ads might have been automatically determined using, perhaps among other things (e.g., the textual content of the email message), information derived from the manually inserted “results.” For instance, Amazon might have an ad offering free shipping for purchases made in the next 48 hours.
[0121] In addition to using the content of the manually inserted “results” to determine content-relevant ads, such manually inserted “results” might be a condition upon which serving ads and/or add-on ads (e.g., coupons) is triggered. Consider, for example, two people using instant text messages concerning lunch options for a get-together on Friday. One of the messages might include a manually inserted UDS “local results” for the restaurants “pf Changs” and “Taco-Bell.” In a text message side-bar, both Taco-Bell and pf Changs might provide coupon-type ads that were triggered by the manually inserted local results included in the message.
I think this would just be asking for people to spam google ads.
Not to metion how would the ads be targeted.
The idea is interesting, but I wonder how workable it is. I think the only really motivation for the sender of the email would be money, but would Google do this more efficiently.
Taking the book club as an example couldn’t the email sender just place an affiliate link to the book at Amazon into the email? Wouldn’t that result in more money than you’d likely get from Google.
Rewards for inserting search results might work. In that case Google could give a reward whether monetary or otherwise to add incentive to placing the results in an email.
As I was readiing through these, I found myself with some reservations about how well this system might work, Steven.
I was also wondering how advertisers might feel about such a program.
Sounds very intriguing – but I have some concerns about spam, and its impact with advertisers in general. Would emails implement the ability to BLOCK all mail that has the ads contained in them? I would assume so – and I would assume that most persons would probably use that feature – thereby negating the purpose of this venture in the first place at least in that aspect.
Hi Malok,
Spam was one of the concerns that I had when I read this, too.
It’s possible that if Google implemented this, it might be limited to Gmail. Of course, Gmail already shows advertisements, but this would be different in that the sender would choose the search results/ads to send.
Unfortunately, the pages for the patent applications pointed to by the links above are showing error messages right now. Hopefully those will be available later.
It sounds interesting… I think it could possibly create a new SEO catagory, “Google spam.” Now, would the be white hat or?
Good point, Geri. Leaves me wondering that, too.
I think people in general are fed up with current advertising methods used by webmasters
Marketing emails are viewed as ‘spam’ regardless of the quality
Popups are painful
Adesense devalues a website (sorry Bill)
Who looks at anything other than the organic listings?
Who takes much notice of over complicated disclaiming signature blocks?
I think most people are like me, if I want something I will find it. Stop hitting me with adverts, they really do have a negative effect. People this includes Google need to have more subtle advertising mechanisms, let the viewer feel in charge. Large corporations on and offline fail in this basic concept.
Google is also allowing users to see the information Google has collected about their interests. Whenever I clean out my Spam folder on Gmail I see ads like “Creamy Spam Broccoli Casserole.
Hi Clark,
Vernor Vinge wrote a science fiction novel called Rainbow’s End, published in 2006 and set a number of years in the future. Google’s book scanning project was an interesting part of the plot, and the Google ads shown to searchers and email readers, but not the searches or emails themselves, were subject to being used by the police as an indirect way of snooping upon what they were doing. When I read patent applications like this one, about contextual advertising, I’m reminded of that novel.