Plethora of Google Location Related Announcements
Google already has an estimated million and a half advertisers, which certainly seems like a hell of a lot to most everybody else, but is it really? What is the total opportunity?
Just to keep this simple, let’s say that there are 15 million brick and mortar retailers in the U.S. (rough estimate) and that Google has 1.5 million advertisers currently as customers. Even if all the existing Google advertisers were brick and mortar advertisers and in the U.S. only they’d still only have 10% penetration of available advertisers. Now in reality over half of Google’s revenue is international and you can bet that a huge chunk of those advertisers are pure e-tailer with no physical store in sight.
There is only so much searching happening on the web and only a small percent of advertisers engaging with Google to try to reach those searchers, so if you’re Google what do you do to speed things along? Well you try to provide more stuff to search for, make it super easy to search for it, and try to engage the 90%+ of advertisers that don’t current engage with you.
So lets look at some of the newly announced efforts made over the past few days, particularly around location and expanding beyond the virtual world to the physical one. Read more
LBS Apple Style: Location Aware, Digital Meets Physical, Affiliate Marketing
The folks at The Register have a detailed piece on an Apple patent that was filed last week covering a broad range of “approaches” for the “display of location specific information” at “pre-determined locations”. The wording “pre determined location” in particular jumped out at me… mostly because these patents usually bend over backwards to be as broad and over reaching as possible, so the inclusion of wording to specifically limit its application seems noteworthy. That and the many reference to ‘establishment specific’ applications paints a picture of a retail store oriented product.
So what kinda “establishment specific” “location specific information” are we talking about here, well from what I can decipher it would seem to include:
- general display panels (aka ads, “welcome to Best Buy, America’s favorite electronics store”)
- ads tied to a specific store ( “This Best Buy store is offering 20% off any albums purchased before noon today)
- ads tied to physical and online store items (“Jimmy Buffet’s new album is out… buy it here, or download it directly to your iPhone for the same price.”)
- ads tied to enhanced online experiences for physical world purchases and items (“don’t take our word for it, visit our online forums to find out what others think of this digital camera”)
- ads tied to public audio broadcast in the store (“like that tune you just heard, it was Viva la Vida by Coldplay buy it here — this is what the album cover looks like — or download it now to your iPhone)
Some of these individual elements we’ve seen before like Shazam which can listen to what music is playing and identify the artist and make it available for download. But what makes it interesting is, looking at it in its entirety with “establishments” and location at the center, it just looks an awful lot like a mobile/location aware version of a good old fashioned web affiliate program ala Commission Junction or Linkshare. You know they ones where links from one site like dogparkusa.com drives sales to another like PetSmart.com… and the referring site dogparkusa.com gets paid a bounty by PetSmart for bringing them a new customer.
It’s the same thing but just throwing in mobile location ‘targeting’… ie an iPhone user from this geographic spot (which happens to be sitting on top of a Best Buy or Starbucks) gets served a relevant contextual ad which converts to a sale on iTunes… and therefore Best Buy or Starbucks gets paid a bounty for having brought Apple a new customer and transaction.
Not unlike what I suspect we will see develop in reverse in search where a mobile digital search results in a physical visit or purchase with the digital search provider receiving compensation for driving that event, all made possible by location awareness of course.
The Mobile Search Opportunity, Turning PageRank into PlaceRank
So I see that Google search market share is up to nearly 2/3 of all searches according to the latest stats, and has been trending in that upward slope for quite a while now. So you may be wondering, what happens when they start to run out of room at say 70, 80, 90 or 100% of search share… how do they keep it going?
Well, one solution is to grow the whole pie by growing the gross number of searches conducted. So how do you do that? For starters you make it super easy and convenient to run a search query, like search on a mobile phone (Google Mobile) while you’re out and about and while at your desk through a browser toolbars that is always there, ready and waiting (Google Toolbar). Second you try to get more and more of the world’s information into the index to make it findable, for example by scanning book or making it easy for any Joe Schmo to create new information say like in a blog on Blogger (acquired 2003).
In fact, the worldwide web has grown like wildfire over the past decade with the Google index growing from 26 million pages in 1998 to 1 billion pages in 2000 and an estimated 1 trillion today. So needless to say there is a lot of information out there to be found, and Google’s success has been built on developing the best mousetrap to help folks sift through those 1 trillion pages and find the information they’re looking for, largely relying on that popularity contest dressed up as a math equation called PageRank to help us uncover the needles among those 1 trillion straws of hay.
If there is any commonality between those 1 trillion pages of information that Google currently helps us navigate through it’s that they all 1. sit on a publicly available webserver usually on a server farm somewhere 2. are not time or place dependent and 3. the popularity rank or pagerank is determined in large part through votes (links) placed by a global democracy of users.
Where I am, and information on the places, items and people around me. Take for example these things that we don’t even consider doing a Google search for
Nearby: The Woodstock Hippie of iPhone Apps
Ok so I was going through a couple of the other mobile location aware iPhone applications, specifically Nearby and Limbo and they couldn’t be more different. I am sure the people running these apps are perfectly well adjusted, super successful business technology professionals, but I couldn’t help conjuring up images of Woodstock hippies for Nearby and those super anal type A guys who immediately file every e-mail, take copious notes at every meeting and schedule their potty time a week in advance for Limbo. I’ll save Limbo for another day, but the fact that they needed to put a “video explanation” on their homepage is telling.
Here was my experience with Nearby.
The Woodstock Hippie
So I loaded up Nearby. Very nice and slick, and great presentation. I love the fact that you could quite easily make modifications to your current location by moving the map and not the icon, genius!
Then I thought I’d look for something… well anything. So I started by searching for a nearby Cuban restaurant by typing in ‘Cuban’ , the results were random. No sign of the Cuban restaurant literally a block or so away, but it did show me the name Margon’s at around 6th and 46th… much further uptown. To be specific… it didn’t tell me the first thing about Margon’s… just the word “Margon’s” and the helpful fact that it was “1,071 meters from you” and “posted by funkeboodha a while ago”. Now even if I was BFF with Mr. Funkeboodha, I am still not sure I’d haul my butt up to 6th and 46th (1,071 meters no less!) and give it a try based on that info.
After a web search it turns out that Margon’s is a little hole in the wall Cuban restaurant that may indeed be worth trying, but that’s not the point, it wasn’t particularly nearby (particularly versus alternatives) and didn’t give me enough information to make a decision either way.
Ok, so then I figured maybe Nearby is not a great tool for finding restaurants so let me just go with the flow and explore what’s popular with the Nearby community… maybe there is exciting stuff happening all around me that I never realized before! So I tap on the ‘Popular’ button and tap on the first little blue post it note I see nearby called ‘Tiger’ which brings me to two posts “Tiger” and “Winky”. One tap deeper I learn that Tiger is a dead cat (including a picture of him before he was dead), and that Winky seems to be an alive Persian cat that evidently got to sit in Santa’s lap this past holiday season…. And that they both live a mere 540 meters away around 32nd street, between 2nd and 3rd! Woo hoo, now we’re getting somewhere!
Ok, so moving right along, I gave it one last try by trying to explore the Nearby “collections”. A collection seems to be a set of POIs around a common them, posted by a Nearby community member… alas finally a little organization! This area seems particularly popular with people posting their favorite restaurants, buildings, and things to do for their friends to see. Besides many personal favorite things to do and and see, nearby collections for me included Great Buildings (5 in total in NYC including Chelsea Market), Important Protests (2 in total), Grand Tour Architecture (3 in total). Lame, Lame and Lame.
So you can see why visions of hippies come to mind… I can hear them now… “aw sure man, it’s cool, you can post anything you want man, anything! No rules at all, if you want to make a map of all the places where you and Yoko did sit in’s in 1965 and quit halfway through go right ahead… it’s all cool man. No worries”
And that is exactly what you get, a big muddy mess.
