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It’s amazing how focused people are on advertising when the whole Internet is based around people finding and consuming only things they want.

• The Internet is a medium of Intent i.e. you always know what customers are looking for and can figure out what they would want.
• People and companies still persist in treating the Internet as they would TV or newspapers i.e. trying to sell people on things.  

People visiting websites have specific intent.

As you get into narrower websites the intent is much more specific and much more valuable.

What would a Perfect Search Engine be like?

A perfect search engine would have zero ads.

Think of it as search being an art and creating a search engine as creating a masterpiece. A search masterpiece would be so good at providing results there would be no place for advertisements.

Any advertisement is basically an admission by the search engine that -

1. Either their results aren’t perfect.
2. Or for financial reasons they need to include advertisements.

Plus ads on search engines aren’t really ads.

Most advertisements on Search Engines are shortcuts.

They are all links related to what people are already searching for.

It’s sites saying -

we are providing a better shortcut to what you’re looking for (product/information) than the organic search results.  

People are so intent focused that they are blind to banner ads. Consider Jakob Nielsen’s post on Banner Blindness.

Jakob Nielsen on how to make ads work.

The only effective way to make ads work is to make them seem like content -

we discovered a fourth approach that breaks one of publishing’s main ethical principles by making the ad look like content:

• The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look at it.
• Not only should the ad look like the site’s other design elements, it should appear to be part of the specific page section in which it’s displayed.

This is why text ads work so well and why they work great when placed above or below or in-between text content.

People are ignoring advertisements unless -

1. They get tricked.
2. The ads are shortcuts to what they are looking for.

Google is basically providing Short-cuts

Whether you consider ads on Google.com properties or Google Ads on other sites – they basically provide short-cuts to what the user is already looking for (or something related).

They are also made to look like content to make it obvious that they are not traditional ‘sell you something you don’t want’ ads.

The entire reason for the success of Google’s advertising is that it takes users where they already want to go. That’s why there is so much focus on relevance, quality, and so forth.

Option 1 - Connect Users to What they Already Want

This is the easy option that everyone is missing.

The search terms that bring people to your site and their actions and clicks on your site tell you what they’re looking for.

1. Provide them the things they’re looking for.

Look to monetize the intent that already exists.

Option 2 - Try to sell people things they don’t want

This is the mindset that people from the physical world can’t get over.

You mean to say we could sell them things they actually want?

Instead of finding 10 million people and trying to convince 1 million of them to buy your fridge -

Find the ten million people who are already looking to buy a fridge. Talk to them.

Improve your product to the point where not just 1 million, but several million will buy your fridge.

The reason why Search has stagnated

There are no big, huge jumps in search.

There won’t be unless -

1. A company is willing to make a search engine so good that it can’t make money off of ads i.e. advertising becomes irrelevant.  
2. A non-profit decides to actually go after search. Not just make a feeble attempt.

Currently, every Search Engine’s focus is on being able to monetize search and not to improve search.

It serves their purpose best if search results are good enough to keep search ‘good’ but bad enough to encourage enough clicks on Ads (shortcuts) that are comparable options to the organic search results.

The supposed improvements are about monetizing better

The main page of search engines now show less results and more ads. Compare them yourself at archive.org.

There are more links to properties that the search engines own and less to properties they don’t.

Search engines are evolving in the direction of making more money off of customers and sending more customers to advertisers - which means they need super relevant ads.

Which begs the question -

Aren’t the most targeted, appropriate advertisements NOT advertisements?

Facebook and lots of other companies are talking about user specific targeting and lots of other fancy words.

Aren’t the best advertisements things that customers are actually looking for?

Yes. And at that point they aren’t advertisements any more.

That is the direction the Internet is going in.

At the point that Intent is actually catered to -

• Either no one will make money.
• OR – One company will control the Internet and make a ton of money.

The question then becomes -

If that’s true then the biggest advertisers and companies should be trying to replace the Internet and not just control advertising. Are they? 

Yes.  

There are two trends that are coming together here -

1. Making ads more and more related to what customers want. 
2. Getting more and more search results (or links on sites) to be ads.

Which means that if you keep thinking about it you realize most big sites are moving in the direction of charging everyone for everything. They want to create a platform where they make 5% to 10% off of everything

It’s not just search engines – every big company is trying to do this.

• Apple with its controlled eco-system and iPhone. 
• Amazon with the Kindle and its web properties. 
• Google with all its properties.
• Facebook with its 350 million users.
• Microsoft with its properties.

All of them are already doing this.

The battle for search and advertising is morphing into a full-out War to replace the Internet.

Filed under: Reality Tagged: | lack thereof, utility of advertising