Google premium display ads to be 'next billion dollar business'

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on March 8, 2010 at 7:53 AM

Google's next move in the online advertising business will be to charge premium prices from brand advertisers for "above the fold" ads, making display the search giant's "next billion dollar business," CEO Eric Schmidt said, paidContent reported.

Premium, "above the fold" ad placements will be aimed at top marketers, who will be able to bid against one another for the units that will be placed in the top half of users' screens. Previously, advertisers have not been able to select where ads will show up.

"In contrast to cost-per-click ad buys, which is about connecting to users by starting conversations, advertisers buying according to CPMs mainly want to get their ads in front of the right users immediately," Brand Bender, product management director of Google, told paidContent last week.

According to a Google AdWords blog post:

"Two types of advertisers run campaigns across the Google Content Network. The first group, direct response advertisers, measures the success of their campaigns by looking for clicks, traffic to their sites, and sales. In contrast, brand advertisers typically use display ads to raise awareness and purchase consideration for a product or service a person might buy down the road. Other advertisers are looking to achieve a combination of these goals...

"With a host of different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, it's hard for advertisers to predict where an ad will land, since the same placement may appear differently on each user's screen. To simplify the process for you, Google has implemented a statistically driven solution to determine which ads are above and below the fold. The statistically driven model only considers ads "above the fold" if they are completely on-screen when the browser window loads."