In what appears to be the best news for domain investors in many years, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon.com is gearing up to directly challenge Google’s dominance of the online advertising market, developing its own software for placing ads online that could leverage its knowledge of millions of Web shoppers.
“Initially, Amazon plans to replace those ads on its pages that Google chiefly supplies with a new in-house ad placement platform,
In the future, that system could challenge Google’s $50 billion-a-year advertising business”
“The people familiar with the matter said Amazon’s offering would resemble Google’s AdWords, the engine that Google uses to place keyword-targeted ads alongside Google search results and on more than two million other websites. AdWords is the foundation of Google’s roughly $50 billion-a-year advertising business, and Google counts Amazon as one of its biggest buyers of text link ads.”
“To displace the Google ads on its site, Amazon is building a tool to help advertising agencies buy in bulk for potentially thousands of advertisers, the people familiar with the matter said. Building such a system could enable Amazon to boost its business placing ads on third-party websites. Google offers similar capability for advertisers using AdWords.”
For the last several years domain investors have seen their revenue go down, while at the same time, Google kept setting profit records, quarter over quarter. The one thing domain investors have been missing is competition for their traffic.
If Amazon puts together a product that actually competes for the traffic and increases payouts to domain holders it could be a game changer.
Interesting that both Google and Amazon where in the top 5 of all companies filing new gTLD applications.
Smart move for Amazon!
Google has been siphoning off money from Amazon.com for years, both indirectly (by waylaying consumers) and directly (with Amazon.com as an ad buyer). So it makes sense for Amazon to reassert its independence, first of all, and secondly to leverage its masses of data for advertising generally.
Once Amazon’s technology really gets going, it’s possible that it will provide much better value than AdWords in certain sectors. After all, Google has data on search habits, which may or may not lead to customer conversions; but Amazon has data on PURCHASE habits.
@Berkens,
Lord knows that Google needs the competition. It’s about time.
Having said that, I expet, and will demand that Amazon approach s respectfully, with a decent deal. if they don’t, I will fight it on all blogs. Don’t get too excited yet Berkens, until we know what’s in it for us.
good decision … AdWords is the Google’s cash cow