Google has a lot of information about the activities of the vast amount of consumers that uses its services. The company is struggling as to how far it wishes to use these valuable information to earn money from. Google has several ideas in mind, such as using more of what it knows about users of Gmail, or come up with a way of selling web data, or even have users pay Google not to display ads to them. This is the summary of an article by Jessica Vascellaro. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead.
Whatever ideas come to mind, one thing is for sure: Google wants to be on top of the information economy. By doing so, the company is looking for ways to loosen up its grip on privacy concerns regarding using data from its users. This wasn’t always the case. In fact, there was a time when Google didn’t want to compromise privacy so much for the sake of profiting. However, Google’s competitors are aggressively tracking online activities of their users, and the company understands that it needs to step up its game as well.
Highly Targeted Ads
Last year, Google started using online user data to display relevant ads depending on a user’s interests. In the case of Google, which has a vast amount of data of its users, these ads are called highly targeted ads. And as a consequence of the massive size of this company, other online companies are expected to follow suit. Google is that influential, and it can even be self regulating in terms of privacy.
Google, with its vast amount of data, has the capacity to create a data trading marketplace, which will allow highly personalized tracking. To some extent, this is being done by eXelate and BlueKai, smaller companies, and Google might be forced to do the same. However, it turns out that Google still adheres to its “Don’t be Evil” policy; that is, Google is strict about not allowing any user tracking if the user isn’t aware that he or she is being followed.
On the other hand, the Google founders have found they can use all these consumer data without compromising the policy. And now, Google has implemented online tracking in most of the most popular websites in the US.
Google Privacy Policy
Google profits most from selling advertisements. It’s primary strategy is to sell ads to consumers based on the keywords they enter, but nowadays, the trend is to sell more relevant ads that are based on highly personalized information. The power of companies is no longer defined in terms of traffic, but in terms of the amount of data it has about its users, and how intelligently the company uses it. Thus, there is a race among ad companies online, and Google’s number one status was compromised.
By then, the revenue of Google is three times higher than Yahoo, but the growth is slowing dramatically. Furthermore, Facebook is a dark horse which can sell ads to its over 500 million members. Facebook has done a lot of good things regarding getting information from its users, such as the simple like button, which Google is now trying to implement as well. Still, nothing compares to Google’s ability to get information from its users.
For the executives of Google, the risk of losing consumer trust is greater than looking for profit opportunities from user data. Google feels that it is the king of the hill, and it would let other smaller companies try out privacy boundaries. The company is against working with other companies that use cookies. Google only implements contextual targeting, or ads based on the content of a web page, and not behavioral targeting, which is deemed more effective. As such, in terms of display ads, Google is behind Yahoo and AOL.
DoubleClick
An opportunity presented itself when DoubleClick presented itself for sale. Microsoft was interested because that company was huge in terms of displaying website ads. Google was hesitant at first, because it uses cookies. Still, they purchased DoubleClick for 3.1 billion dollars during 2007, knowing that this move will give them clients and experts in display advertising.
Google executives then realized that they were behind in terms of targeting ads with even Microsoft and AOL, so they decided its time to use cookies. DoubleClick cookies were installed on a user’s personal computer every time a Google ad was displayed on a page. But with this ability, Google didnt’ use the technology right away.
Mr. Weinberg, from DoubleClick, also had confidential ideas that may revolutionize ad targeting, but also with a strong sense of privacy connotations. One of these ideas was getting other websites to share their data to Google for targeting, and another idea was to sell ads based on Gmail data.
Interest-based Ads
2008 marked the start of launching Google ads targeted to the interests of users. There was conflict between Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google founders, as to the extent of using targeting for Google’s benefits, but they finally concluded that this plan go ahead, and interest-based ads were finally launched by March 2009. While this is available only to a limited number of advertisers, users can now be tracked using cookies from visiting around a mllion sites containing Google display ads. Furthermore, users can opt out from this targeting strategy by visiting http://google.com/ads/preferences and opting out.
