Google AdWords Blog

Google 'getting into the payday loan business' is likely just Google continuing to test its Comparison Ads feature:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-adwords-comparison-ads.html

Not surprising that they're there - the industry throws off a boatload of money, but only a portion currently goes to Google, since there's an established lead gen industry acting as intermediaries between Google and the actual payday loan providers.

Same situation as with mortgage leads - and in fact Google's used the same 'bringing transparency to a shady and inefficient industry' rhetoric when they've talked about mortgage lead generation.

Like with mortgage leads, this initiative is probably doomed, since the big advertisers in the space have absolutely no desire to efficiently compete for consumers via directly-comparable financial terms. When an industry's confusing and opaque, it's usually for a reason.

Best to read this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/mdudas/status/638792939842469893

This only applies to page covering ads for app installs. Not other interstitials. In fact Google recently did a study showing how 69% of people leave the page when faced with an interstitial [1], yet they also recently released an updated format for their own Google overlay ad [2] (although this is for apps). They don't want to lose web/search traffic to apps, but they make plenty of money running these formats themselves. A good summary of the various conflicts of interest is here [3].

1. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/07/google-case-study-on-app-download-interstitials.html

2. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/08/beautiful-new-designs-for-full-screen.html

3. http://searchengineland.com/google-goes-app-interstitial-protecting-consumers-search-monopoly-228543

Selling adverts on a quality site is under utilizing a site in many scenarios, IMHO.

If your ad space will be profitable for the advertiser, become your own advertiser. Pivot to generate more direct revenue. I'm doing that on a number of sites of mine and it's working well.

Example: Google is getting into the loan lead generation business (http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-adwords-comparison-ads.html) and the airlines business (http://www.google.com/press/ita/) because they know that by letting advertisers get access to their audience, they are leaving a lot of money on the table.

I see their trend towards trying to get more of the pie continuing over time to expand into banking, movie tickets, car rentals and a gazillion other industries until they start coming close to the antitrust lines because it's a huge source of revenue.

https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html

Half of YouTube's watch time is on mobile and trends show it growing faster: http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-video-watch-time-grew-60-2015-7

Ad blockers might be concerning but I don't believe they're currently widespread on mobile and with one mobile OS developer being hostile to 'advanced' apps like ad blockers and filesystem browsers and the other being an ad company, I don't think that's likely to change significantly.

It's easy to forget when your job has you on a desktop all day but mobile is now the 'default' way many (most?) people access the internet. Google receives more search queries on mobile than on desktop in many countries: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/05/building-for-next-moment.html

I don't personally care about Latitude, but it does seem recently that Google have been on a crusade to ruin Google Maps on mobile devices. The two most noteworthy instances: (1) screwing up the offline-maps feature (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/Ck_Pd6UgZCU -- but they've slightly walked this back: see https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3246076) and (2) adding advertisements to the Android version of Maps: http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/attract-new-customers-with-local-ads-on.html (I don't mind this at all on the web version of Maps, where I'm usually on a display with plenty of pixels, but on a mobile device that's a whole lot of space being taken up by advertisements instead of actually useful information).

Google's 2009 internal research indicates this isn't true:

http://adwords.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/conversion-rates-dont-vary-much-with-ad.html

"...on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad. For example, for pages where 11 ads are shown the conversion rate varies by less than 5% across positions. In other words, an ad that had a 1.0% conversion rate in the best position, would have about a 0.95% conversion rate in the worst position, on average."