What Does the Google/AOL Deal Means to Publishers?
According to a New York Times article (registration required), Google is purchasing a 5% stake in AOL for one billions dollars. Here is my take on how this will affect the AdSense world.
One thing that will change is that Google will put special AOL ads on their web sites.
If a user searches on Google for a topic for which AOL has content – like information about Madonna – there will be a special section on the bottom right corner of the search results page with links to AOL.com. Technically, AOL will pay for those links, which will be identified as advertising, but Google will give AOL credits to pay for them as part of the deal. They will also carry AOL’s logo, the first time Google has agreed to place graphic ads on its search result pages.
The one effect I see this having may be a slight decrease in CTR for AdWords advertisers. The regular AdWords ads that are displayed on Google’s searches will have more competition on the screen, so they will be clicked less often. Advertisers may not be too happy about this.
The other slightly disturbing thing was this quote:
Google will also provide technical assistance so AOL can create Web pages that will appear more prominently in the search results list. But this assistance will not change computer formulas that determine the order in which pages are listed in Google’s search results.
If Google engineers, who know the “computer formulas” are giving technical assistance, this means that they will have an unfair advantage over other publishers in getting good results in the SERPs. Other publishers need to guess what SEO techniques work best on websites. If AOL knows what works best they will do better than everyone else.
To me this goes against Google’s philosophy of always providing the most “natural” results as possible in their search results.
More commentary at John Battelle’s Searchblog
