Google Maps advertising
Posted on January 11, 2006
Filed Under Business, Tech |
David Galbraith has pointed out some Google Maps advertising tests. Checkout this search for hotels in New York City…click on the little blue ballons.
I would be paying very close attention if I were in the yellow pages business…you’re gonna have to do something pretty tasty to stay relevant in the face of this. In 2-3 years dead tree versions of your directory will start becoming rapidly irrelevant. It’s started already, but once the mobile internet picks up real speed, and once we’ve all got connectivity in our cars (with LCD screens, connectivity and GPS) this kind of map interface is going to be THE way we find stuff we used to lookup in the yellow pages.
No doubt the forward thinking players in the yellow pages business will be planning their own map type interfaces, but I can’t help but think we’re gonna see some ad spend convergence here…If I am a retail chain operator trying to drive sales online as well as people through my bricks and mortar stores Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) will be able to service my needs pretty seemlessly.
Actually with that thought in mind I wonder if we’ll ever see Google buying yellow pages companies for access to their customer lists. Clearly they’d have some overlap already, but it might be a good way to speed up revenue growth in both search and mapvertising, particularly when you consider that the yellow pages market is still currently WAY bigger than the entire online advertising market (as David points out).
Anyway, bloody interesting stuff.
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