My post on Google Analyst day mentioned how I thought that Jonathan Rosenberg was intimating big changes to come in AdSense, including behavioral targeting. The great thing about Google is that you usually only have to wait 4 days until things become clearer.
Search Engine Watch breaks the news that AdWords will sell demographic based targeting. Jennifer Slegg wrote that article and goes into further detail on her blog: putting it in proper perspective for AdSense. Jennifer also has the "missing slides" from analyst day and she does a good job of breaking down the key bullet points from the slides:
But strong competitors are attempting to aggregate traffic
- AdSense margins will be squeezed in 2006 and beyond
- Y! and MSN will do un-economic things to grow share
- The ad network will be commoditized over time
You can see that Google is looking over its shoulder (even though right now Yahoo and MSN especially have serious disadvantages.)
Jen says:
With the other types of media, we have seen the rich media beta test as well as Google's expansion into print ads, radio ads and click-to-call. They slide also mentions television advertising as well as direct mail.
Google also mentions: "Advanced Tools & Reporting for sophisticated advertisers (e.g., API, bid management, ad scheduling)" and better integration with other Google products such as Analytics.
From the announcements and the leaked slides, I think you can see two big trends:
- Google's getting serious about the AdSense competition
- The 'Cringley theory' of Google applying their open-market model to ALL kinds of media is real.
