The lines between content and advertising have been blurring at an increasing pace. In the early days we called this product placement. But in the name of ‘integrated marketing’, typified by the Coca-Cola couch on American Idol, everyone wants a piece of the action.
Google, as we have heard, has just changed the look of its ‘sponsored links’ (those paid links on the right hand side of the search results page) so that they don’t look like down-played banner ads. Yahoo! shot back with 'paid links' confirming what many have always believed: that the links you get when you search for a subject are there by design, and not the result of an automated indexing system.
Yahoo’s new policy is to charge $49 (annually) if an advertiser wants a guaranteed place on a results page. Earlier it had a 'sponsored listing' policy. The model is actually very simple: Demand and supply. Media and audience.
In other words: Search and you will find. Pay and you will be found.
But it’s pointless to fault these two ‘engines’ for that. I always knew that Yahoo! and Google were media companies. They were not invented simply to make life easy. They were founded to make money, no different from AOL, a magazine, or Clear Channel Communications.
What surprises me is that a large percentage of people still think a Google search is the only way to conduct research! Anyone heard of that fabulous, powerful, search tool called “the public library?”
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