23
January
2005
|
21:57 PM
America/Los_Angeles

A googol of Google scoops…and much, much more!

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher.com


Last week was a very good one for Silicon Valley Watcher with exclusives and scoops throughout the week. We almost ran out of bandwidth again, as the world wanted to read what the Watcher wrote.


We met with the Kanoodle boys, a media savvy gang who rode into town looking for Brin and Larry for a high-noon showdown. An impressive bunch, from Fifth Avenue, New York City, no less. That’s the media capital of the world—(at least for now…).


Geeks versus the Media City Slickers—the prize: a multibillion dollar text ads business doubling every two or so years.


Can the shy, retiring Google Geeks, armed with just software and hardware, take on the Kanoodle team bursting with media knowledge capital, and armed with a straight look in the eye and a firm handshake? Yes. No problem.


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Googleplex in Mountain View: Epicenter of the multibillion dollar text ad industry


Kanoodle left town with a boot mark on their rear as Silicon Valley Watcher broke the news that Google will release an API for Adwords. It ruffled the feathers of the Yahoo Overture group too, who are keen to tell us their side of the story regarding APIs.


With access to a Google API, Adwords customer computers can interact with the largest distributed computer system on this planet. And that means advertisers can use Google as an ad server platform with unprecedented levels of control over their text ads delivery. That’s a genius strategy, because Google Geeks don’t need to be media savvy--they leave that to their customers. Google can stick to what it knows best, how to build complex software engineering that is easy to use.


Google doesn’t have to package their text ads programs in neat ways, as Kanoodle does, with a variety of permutations for customers. By giving access to the API, they let the advertisers execute and monitor ad campaigns any way they choose to -- no second guessing needed. Oh, and by the way, you can also track Yahoo Overture text ads too within the same tools.


Yes, it means more work for the advertisers as they come to grips with and integrate the Google Adwords API, as well as figure out best practices. But it will create a large ad monitoring and management tools market from third parties because Google is the largest IT platform, and that carries a a certain amount of lock-in that will discourage sonme customers from switching from the familiar.


But, let’s see it all in action first, and let’s see if Google can match or exceed Kanoodle’s claim of an average double-the-revenues- per-click compared with Adsense.


As I said before, may they both do well, so I and my blogger brethren can do well. And I can get somebody to drag my car out of the Googleplex parking lot where it has been stuck for a month following the holiday media party, (and no, the car is not filled with high-tech listening gear—-we get our scoops the old-fashioned way, people tell us). Another Google scoop coming your way this week. . .but you have to watch the Watcher.


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