AOL To Sell Ads Direct, Using Google's Tools

AOL To Sell Ads Direct, Using Google’s Tools

Apr 6, 2007 at 6:16pm ET by Danny Sullivan

As John Battelle notes, the embargo on AOL’s deal to white label Google’s AdWords system and sell ads direct on its own has been broken. It’s no surprise this was coming. A white label deal was announced back in December 2005 when AOL renewed with Google:

Under the strategic alliance, Google and AOL will continue providing search technology to AOL’s network of Internet properties worldwide. The agreement’s broad range of new features for users and advertisers include:

Creating an AOL Marketplace through white labeling of Google’s advertising technology – enabling AOL to sell search advertising directly to advertisers on AOL-owned properties;

Finally, AOL is moving ahead with what was promised. John has a release and more details from AOL. You can also see a Reuters article here. Chris Sherman was working on our article about this for Monday’s planned release date, so we’ll either update this post with more or push fresh news out then.

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is a Founding Editor of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

http://www.topranksearch.com David

mmmm …..

This sounds interesting. Hats off to AOL for not trying to reinvent the wheel which Google built so well.

Hopefully the whole thing will be as seamless as adWords.

David
Matt Greitzer

AOL actually launched this a few months ago (late January). I believe the terms of their Google deal permit them only to sell search ads directly to the top 2000 advertisers. Not positive on this, but I think this offering will only be available to large brands.

The other curious part of AOL’s offering is that running search ads on AOL does not guarantee that your search ads will actually run – AOL will arbitrage between their own auction and the Google syndicated listings and display whichever listings drive the highest revenue to AOL. Very confusing, and somewhat self-serving.

AOL, too, is struggling to build out the operations support to manage a stand-alone search offering. They have a solid team, but are having a hard time staffing and supporting a search offering in a media-centric organization. It will be a while before they get this right.
http://www.vinnylingham.com/2007/04/aol-only-adwords-marketplace-revenue-impact.html VinnyLingham

Some more in depth analysis here:

http://www.vinnylingham.com/2007/04/aol-only-adwords-marketplace-revenue-impact.html