Why is having a business model that generates billions of dollars in revenue annually, employs tens of thousands of people, and still allows you to maintain dominance considered a failure?
The ads platform is self-optimizing, punishing advertisers with poor ads, low relevance, and poor brand perception. This results in ads that are from more trustworthy sellers and whom generate real customer interaction to justify buying those ads. To me, this system encourages higher relevance in commerce queries because those who deliver the best user experiences after you leave Google are the ones that can afford to bid to the top of the ads marketplace.
As you said, people dismiss them. That's a failure.
It's a failure to deliver value to the searcher and a failure to deliver value to the advertiser.
The idea is fine, but if in practice people just ignore the ads...
Google is making great money from search-based ads, of course, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a massive inefficiency created by a large number of users ignoring a large number of ads.
The obvious opportunity for a competitor is to correct that inefficiency and deliver more value for searchers and advertisers.
Great question, I think should have qualified my earlier comment that "people" was in reference to those of us involved in tech/startups. I haven't seen the recent studies but a lot of people click on paid ads, even more surprising is that a lot of people don't even know the difference or care about the difference.
I don't know if I would call it a failure for the advertiser since compared to other forms of advertising, you only pay when users engage with your ad. Impressions are free for the advertisers if users see but don't click. For Google, I do agree that it's a qualified failure in that some people want to block these results or ignore them but I think they've been taking steps to fix this by making ads less static and more dynamic like with their shopping results or with their hotel/airfare products.
FWIW, if I'm doing an obviously commercial query - usually comparison shopping or looking for local businesses or professional services - I click on the ads all the time. It's like having hand-curated search results where each curator has an incentive to put their best foot forwards.
The curator always has a bias, usually a strong bias. At least when it's labeled as an Ad, you know the bias exists and can account for it by visiting multiple sites. The only way to solve bias issues is to get many contrasting viewpoints so you can decide for yourself what the reality is.
I usually have both the query and query + [reviews] open in separate tabs. Either that, or just the reviews query, because that usually surfaces enough ads that I can click through all the major players myself.
I'm rarely looking for a search result that takes me to a place to spend money either, but when I'm not I usually don't get ads either. Check out [jquery touch] or [haskell ffi] or even [gabby douglas] and [us open]. No ads on any of them.
People dismiss TV ads. Are they failures?
No, the point of ads is not that 100% pay attention to them. The point is that there is that 0.01% of people who are going to look at it, and at a large enough scale it become worth it. That is why TV advertising and online advertising has not died.
It also doesn't mean that there is a massive inefficiency created by a large number of users ignoring a large number of ads.
I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion, or what constitutes a large number. I'm not saying your wrong exactly, but it sounds like some pretty significant assumptions are being made in your statement. Proof?
I was actually under the impression that most people find the ads relevant more often that not. However, I can't remember where I read that so I won't stand behind it.
