Mike Arrington has an insightful post on TechCrunch about the tech world’s growing negative attitude towards Google. While he is right about the tipping point having arrived both in Google’s arrogance and our awareness of it, there is another tipping point that will soon occur in relation to Google. My prediction for 2007 is that this will be the year that Google begins to inject interstitial ads into its RSS feeds. They are already testing AdSense for feeds, but that is currently used to place ads within each feed item. Interstitial ads for feeds will be new feed items that appear between normal posts as if they were their own posts.
Arrington’s advises Google to get back to its initial philosophy of not being evil, but he ignores the even greater shift away from their stated goal of “indexing the world’s information.” That goal has nothing to do with the Google we have seen in 2006 and will see even more in 2007. Google’s sole reason for existence is now to serve as many ads in as many locations as possible. How can Google grow its ad inventory from its already huge base? It must start placing ads in totally new media. The YouTube purchase is a clear example of this approach, and the results will soon become pervasive in videos on the Web. The next virgin territory for ads is RSS feeds. There are already some examples of this, of course, but Google will take it to a level we haven’t seen before.
In 2007 Google will go beyond offering feed owners the ability to choose to place ads in their own feeds. The real secret to success in RSS advertising will be to place ads in feeds without asking permission of the authors, and more importantly, not sharing the revenue with the feed’s owner. How can they do this? Doesn’t it violate copyright law to inject ads into a feed without the owner’s permission? It might if Google did it with individual feeds where the ownership is clear. But what about merged feeds, where items from multiple sources are assembled into a single feed? What would stop Google from placing ads as separate items into these merged feeds? The analogy to search results is clear. Google can combine results from multiple Web pages into a single page, and then run ads without paying the pages’ owners. Why is combining ads with items from multiple feeds any different?
The way for Google to work up to this is very simple. First they can put interstitial ads into their own RSS feeds, from products like Google News and Google Blogsearch. Then they can open up the one feed that is sure to get a lot of traffic, Google Web Search. This still doesn’t have a feed, but creating one with interstitial ads would desensitize the market to this type of advertising. Finally, Google can use its growing dominance of the feed reader market to place interstitial ads within the merged feeds it already provides from Google reader. As rivers of feed items grow in importance as a way of handling information glut, Google’s merged feeds with interstitial ads will become the norm for users of feeds.
Arrington correctly identifies Yahoo as one of the tech companies that reached the tipping point in arrogance during Web 1.0. Another role Yahoo played, back when it was the dominant search engine, was to pioneer the use of banner ads on Web pages. They weren’t the first site to sell banners, but when they introduced banner ads on their home page in 1995 they made this form of advertising acceptable. Back then there was this quaint notion that the Internet was not supposed to be commercial, and advertising in any form was highly controversial. In 2007 the current leader in search will crack a similar barrier in the way of advertising in RSS. Is this a good thing? I don’t know how to answer that. Were ads on Web pages a good thing? They were hated when they first appeared and now they are accepted as the norm, and even praised as a way for Web 2.0 companies to finance free Web services. I’m sure once we accept interstitial feed ads they will be welcomed as the way for companies to offer free feed services.