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.

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief 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 oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and can be followed on Twitter here.

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3 COMMENTS ON AOL To Sell Ads Direct, Using Google’s Tools

David, April 7th, 2007 at 9:43 am ET:

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, April 7th, 2007 at 9:46 am ET:

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.

VinnyLingham, April 9th, 2007 at 5:09 pm ET:

Some more in depth analysis here:

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

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