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MySpace In Ad Talks With Google, Yahoo And Microsoft

News Corp is reportedly in talks with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo about striking a search advertising deal for its struggling social network MySpace.

Currently MySpace has a search advertising deal with Google that was reached in 2006 and is worth $900 million over a four-year period. That deal expires next month and News Corp needs to reach some kind of agreement on a new ad deal for MySpace, although any such deal will be for "significantly less money," according to the Wall Street Journal.

MySpace has steadily lost traffic over the last few years as Facebook continues to see explosive growth. In May, MySpace attracted 109 million users globally, down nearly 13 percent from the same month last year, according to comScore.

News Corp executives think that privacy and other issues about Facebook give it an opportunity for MySpace to attract new users and advertisers. They concede MySpace will never be as big as Facebook.

Part of MySpace’s strategy is to focus on entertainment related content such as music and videos. "MySpace says it is focused on Web surfers younger than 35, and is offering them a place to find new music, videos, games and other diversions, and to locate new people with similar interests," the Journal reported.

"MySpace’s new strategy in addition includes ways for musicians, comedians, authors and fashion designers to gather an audience and tools to measure who and where their fans are."

"A band, for instance, could use MySpace to share music with fans and get feedback, as well as adjust their touring schedule to add concerts in Texas, for example, if the musicians see their MySpace fan base is heavily from that state."

MySpace also wants to attract users by offering better privacy features than Facebook. "MySpace has also touted its initiatives to allow users to easily keep secret their personal information such as photos, birth date and hobbies, a counter to recent privacy worries about Facebook," the Journal said.

While Facebook has 548 million users worldwide according to comScore, MySpace executives are focused on increasing the percentage of U.S. users who are 13- to 34-years old who visit the site each month to 75 percent from 50 percent.

July 6, 2010
eBay Ends AdCommerce PPC Ads on eBay.com and eBay.ca

Starting on August 4th, eBay will be retiring its AdCommerce placements on eBay.com and eBay.ca. It will continue to offer the service in Europe and Australia.

This is a program that allowed eBay sellers to purchase pay-per-click ads on search result pages linking to their eBay stores and listings.

Did you use AdCommerce ads? What do you think of eBay’s decision to end the serrvice? Share your thoughts here.

"We understand that you may be disappointed and that these AdCommerce ads may have provided an advantage to your business," says the eBay AdCommerce team. "However, we are confident that consistently displaying the most relevant items highest in the search results is in the best interest of buyers, sellers and the eBay marketplace overall."

"As you probably know, the AdCommerce pay-per-click ad program launched last year as a trial to test various ad placement opportunities on eBay," the company says. "During that time, we’ve determined that providing the best possible experience for eBay buyers and sellers means highlighting in Best Match search results the most relevant listings from sellers who offer the best prices and service."

Sellers who have already purchased AdCommerce ads don’t have to take any action. Their ads will automatically expire on August 4th, and their final billing will be sent out in early September, the company says.

Are you an AdCommerce user? Let us know.

July 4, 2010
Apple’s iAds Now Appearing for Users

Apple’s iAds are making their way into the wild after weeks of hype. MacRumors.com says, "their presence appears to be very spotty on iAd-compatible applications at the moment with banners appearing only occasionally while at other times the apps simply show blank space in the banner location."

Engadget has an interesting piece on "What Killed the Kin", Microsoft’s ill-fated feature phone that has not been around for very long. The article seems to suggest that the product line may have been doomed from the get go.

Gizmodo reports that Finland’s policy to make broadband a legal right went into effect today. This was originally announced back in October. "It’s only a 1Mbps connection for now, but by 2015 they’re promised 100Mbps," writes Kat Hannaford.

Complaints about the iPhone 4’s antenna troubles have amounted to multiple class action suits against Apple, according to reports. Boy Genius Report has an alleged "conversation" with Steve Jobs, who appears to be playing down the antenna issues. Update: Fortune reports this conversation was a Facek, citing Apple PR.

HP completed its acquisition of Palm, after just a couple months. HP got it for a pirce of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash.

July 1, 2010
Groupon and McClatchy Team Up on Deals at Newspaper Sites

Groupon has signed a national agreement with The McClatchy Company to distribute exclusive content to McClatchy’s sites in 28 U.S. markets.

Visitors to McClatchy sites will get deals from Groupon that aren’t even available at Groupon.com. These will initially launch in Sacramento and Kansas City, with other regions following over the coming months.

In a joint release, the two companies explain their motivation:

For McClatchy, the agreement provides a key component in a local marketplace initiative designed to bring together consumers looking for bargains with merchants seeking to increase their sales.

For Groupon the agreement is part of a larger initiative to offer a new, incremental revenue stream to major publishers. According to Sean Smyth, Groupon’s VP of Business Development, Groupon enables publishers to seize consumer interest and generate buzz in their local markets by presenting readers with high-value, unique local market experiences.

"Groupon has pioneered and perfected the daily deal structure in markets of all sizes across the globe,” said Sean Smyth, Groupon’s VP of Business Development. "As leaders and innovators in the space we continue to ask ourselves what’s next. Providing merchants with major alternative channels to run deals is vital. McClatchy is an ideal partnership that blends our respective strengths to provide consumers with unbeatable savings on great experiences in their local markets."

Groupon says it has saved its subscribers over $285 million so far. This deal could give that number a big boost.

July 1, 2010
Spending on Rich Media and Social Ads for Mobile on the Rise

Millennial Media has released its latest S.M.A.R.T. (U.S. Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting) report on how the mobile web is increasing. This includes more users, longer sessions, advertisers targeting more campaigns, etc.

The report also indicates a significant increase in advertisers’ spend on rich media, and an increase in campaigns sending consumers to social media sites.

Millennial says its audience reach accounts for 82% of U.S. mobile Internet users. Here’s a chart with some noteworthy statistics from the report:

Some other interesting stats from the report include:

– The US Mobile Web increased by approximately 3% from 73.2M users to 75.3M

– Average user time on the Mobile Web increased nearly one minute month-over-month, to 5:03 (min:sec) in May.

– Mobile Web represented over 77% of the Campaign Destination Mix (as opposed to App downloads)

– Advertisers increased their ad spend on Rich Media by 85% in May

– Campaigns sending consumers to multiple social media sites have grown 50% since Millennial began tracking the campaign action in January.

Find the entire report here. There is plenty more graphical information about telecom campaigns, campaign destinations, targeting, etc.

July 1, 2010
Local.com Pays $5m for Local Ad Solution Provider Octane360

Local search site Local.com has acquired Octane360, a provider of domain-based local ad solutions for small businesses, domain portfolio owners, agencies and channel partners.

Local.com is paying $5 million in cash and stock, with an earnout of up to $5.9 million if certain performance criteria are met in the two-year period following the closing.

"This transaction represents a significant expansion of Local.com’s product suite and technology platform, allowing us to manage the scaled acquisition, creation and deployment of geo-category targeted small business domains," said Heath Clarke, Local.com chairman and CEO. "Furthermore, Octane Experts’ content marketplace allows for the scaled procurement of proprietary, curated content, thereby enhancing the SEO value of local domains under our management."

Local.com says with Octane360, it can offer the following services:

– Large scale targeting and registration of geo-category based local website domains

– Small business and geo-category website creation, hosting and management

– An ad exchange to manage the selection and deployment of ad inventory across all Local.com Owned & Operated and Network sites, as well as third-party and directly owned domain portfolio properties

– A content marketplace to allow for the management of geo-category content written for advertising customers or Local.com’s directly owned portfolio properties

Octane360 will become a wholly-owned division of Local.com.

July 1, 2010
Google’s AdMob Reflects on 2 Years of Mobile Evolution

AdMob released its Mobile Metrics report for May, which focuses on changes in the mobile market over the course of two years. Unsurprisingly, a lot has changed. While AdMob’s network traffic itself has grown a lot in that time, the company says there continues to be strong regional differences with devices used to access the mobile web.

"Smartphones have also grown rapidly, in May 2008 they generated 22 percent of ad requests and in May 2010 smartphones accounted for 46 percent of ad requests," the company reports. "In May 2008, the iPhone and iPod touch generated 1.3 percent of worldwide requests and the first Android handset was still six months from launching. Two years later, the two platforms accounted for 42 percent of all ad requests worldwide, driven by strong application usage."

Other highlights picked out by the company include:

– 92 countries generated more than 10 million monthly requests, up from 27 in May 2008.

– Traffic from North America, Asia, Western Europe, Latin America and Oceania all increased by a factor of at least 6x from May 2008 to May 2010.

– Smartphones accounted for 46 percent of traffic, feature phones for 42 percent of traffic and Mobile Internet Devices for 12 percent of traffic in May 2010.

– Motorola feature phones were the top three devices in AdMob’s network in May 2008, but in May 2010 the only Motorola device in the top ten was the Droid.

– The Nokia N70 was the number one smartphone in AdMob’s network in May 2008. It dropped to number two in May 2009 and down to number four in May 2010, but continues to be the top smartphone from Nokia in AdMob’s network.

– The Top 5 iPad countries in AdMob’s network, based on the number of unique devices, were the United States (58 percent), Japan (5 percent), United Kingdom (4 percent), China (4 percent), and Canada (3 percent).

– A year ago, the HTC Dream (G1) was the only Android device broadly available. In May 2010, the leading handset, the Motorola Droid, had only 21 percent of the Android users in the AdMob network demonstrating the broad range of Android devices available.

Remember that all of the findings mentioned are based solely on data from AdMob’s own network, which is quite large, but not all encompassing. Much of the data, however, pre-dates AdMob’s acquisition by Google.

The entire report can be found here.

June 30, 2010
Diagnose Keyword Issues with New AdWords Feature

There is a new Keyword Diagnosis option in the Keywords tab in AdWords. This can give advertisers detailed diagnostic info for multiple keywords at a time.

"Whether you have ten keywords or ten thousand, making sure your ads are showing is a top priority," says Miles Johnson of Google’s Inside AdWords crew.

To use the feature, simply select "Diagnose keywords" from the "More actions" menu on the Keywords tab:

"After clicking ‘Run test,’ you’ll see the real-time results appear in the Status column next to each keyword," explains Johnson. "If all is well, you see ‘Ad showing.’ If not, you’ll see a brief summary of the problem (for example, ‘Low bid or quality score’)."

Users can hover over speech bubble icons to get more details on the status of any keyword. You may find more info on quality score issues, for example.

June 30, 2010
Google Continues Experimenting with Different Ad Strategies

According to the Wall Street Journal, YouTube is looking to launch skippable ads in YouTube videos later in the year. Google reportedly talked about this in a press conference at its "Real-time Bidding, Banner Ads, Google’s Newest Big Business and Burgers" event.

WSJ quotes senior product manager Baljeet Singh as saying, users would be able to skip pre-roll ads, that advertisers wouldn’t be charged for skipped ads, and that Google’s "been playing around with it for the last three quarters and seeing really great results." He reportedly said that this would encourage advertisers to invest in compelling ads.

Meanwhile, Google is also testing more cost-per-action strategies. Pete Barlas with Investor’s Business Daily says the company has stepped up testing in this area over the last six months.

He quotes a Google spokesperson as saying, "As we are currently in the process of collecting and analyzing data from this ongoing beta, we don’t have any metrics or much more to share on this topic at the moment."

Meanwhile, Google has certainly been making plenty of refinements to its cash cow, AdWords. This week, Google launched new Goals options, and has recently added the " Analyze Competition " feature to the opportunities tab. They also launched a new click-to-call from Apps format, announced the Google Display Network, some changes to reporting, and the availability of sitelinks in all AdWords campaigns.

June 30, 2010
Ad.ly Launches its In-Stream Monetization Platform

Ad.ly announced today that it has launched its in-stream monetization platform for apps and websites. This means that apps or sites that publish streams from any source (like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.) can use Ad.ly’s API to serve contextually and locally targeted ads based on streams they are reading and where they’re located. The platform is called Ad.ly for Apps.

"Apps are key constituents in the stream ecosystem, yet they have very limited options for monetizing their streams. At the same time the inventory they represent is very attractive to our current base of marketers," says Ad.ly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh. "We built Ad.ly for Apps to connect the dots and help both apps and marketers create more value out of the stream."

Apps and sites can join Ad.ly’s network by going to its developer page. "Once approved, these applications and websites can implement the Ad.ly for Apps API, which take as its input the contents of the stream and returns one or more targeted in-stream ads, which the app can stylize and display adjacent the given stream," the company says. "The Ad.ly for Apps API is flexible in that it works with any stream on any application on any platform, enabling applications and websites to monetize all their available stream inventory."

First Ad.ly is launching the product with its existing advertisers and partners, but they’ll be adding a self-service buying interface for advertisers in the coming weeks.

Earlier this month, Ad.ly announced a partnership with MySpace.

June 30, 2010
Google Launches New Options for Goals in AdWords

Google has released three new options for advertiser goals in the AdWords opportunities tab. These are:

1. Maintain or Decrease Cost – Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your current spend.

2. Increase Traffic – Identify ideas that can help you get more traffic at varying cost levels.

3. Balance Cost and Traffic – Review a mix of ideas that are aimed at either increasing traffic or decreasing costs.

It has been a pretty busy month for the AdWords crew, it seems. The company recently added the " Analyze Competition " feature to the opportunities tab. They also launched a new click-to-call from Apps format, announced the Google Display Network, some changes to reporting, and the availability of sitelinks in all AdWords campaigns.

The new options are being rolled out globally, starting today.

June 29, 2010
Should User Engagement Come at the Expense of Pageviews?

MSNBC.com is rolling out a redesign of its site that has raised a few eyebrows. The reason for this is the shift in focus from pageviews to user engagement. The site has moved to a one-page format, and has traded in banner ads for a different approach.

There’s no question that user engagement is a good thing and can attract advertisers, but should this be at the expense of pageviews? That’s a risk MSNBC is clearly willing to take. The Seattle Times has a couple quotes from the site’s VP of creative development:

The redesign may lead to fewer page views. Instead of maximizing the number of pages users visit, MSNBC.com is trying to increase time spent on pages by enabling them to read text, watch views, peruse photo galleries and comment in one place, said designer Ashley Wells, the site’s vice president of creative development.

"The quality of the ad impressions goes way up, the engagement with the user goes up," Tillinghast said. "If that means fewer page views, we’re fine with that."

PaidContent quotes a rep from MSNBC as saying, "Msnbc.com is in the business of selling advertiser experiences, not ad units."

The move is getting others throughout the news industry talking. "It is a distinctive approach," says Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun. "Where most others encourage — and require — click-throughs to launch photo galleries and most of the text content (to garner page views to serve up ad impressions), MSNBC.com has determined its strategy will be to focus heavily on the front page and to attract advertising and sponsorship support to it."

The redesign has reportedly gone "fully live", but it’s not done rolling out as far as I can tell, mainly because I’m not seeing it yet.

What do you think of MSNBC’s strategy? Smart or risky? Comment here.

June 28, 2010
Twitter Ads Impress Coke

Twitter’s Promoted Trends concept is a hit. A marketing executive at Coke, which was only the second company (after Disney) to give it a shot, could hardly say enough good things about the new ad platform in an interview, using words like "great" and "phenomenal."

Carol Kruse, Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing, first told Tim Bradshaw at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, "The amount of impressions in such a short period of time around our whole World Cup campaign, to me it was a phenomenal time." Which was a reference to 86 million impressions in 24 hours, if you’re curious.

Kruse then continued, "It made this emotional connection at the time, it was great." And that observation stems from the fact Coke saw an engagement rate of six percent when a rate of 0.2 percent is more typical.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to call Promoted Trends a complete success, because no one knows how much Coke paid for its Promoted Trend. Those big numbers wouldn’t be bargains if the price was high enough.

The Promoted Trends platform appears to have gotten off to a great start, though. An endorsement like Kruse’s in fact sounds like something Twitter should have paid for.

Count on seeing a lot of other companies try to follow Coke’s lead, then, perhaps to the point that Twitter will be able to raise its rates (whatever they are) and make even more money.

June 25, 2010
Google Makes Sitelinks Available in All AdWords Campaigns

Google has launched Ad Sitelinks for all AdWords campaigns. The feature was made available late last year for advertisers’ top performing ads, but is now available via a one-line format for all campaigns.

Google says advertisers who have used the format in the past have experienced big gains, and have boosted clickthrough rates by over 30% (on average).

"When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad," says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format."

"You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign," Friedman adds.

Advertisers can set up ad sitelinks for their campaigns by finding the option in the Campaign Settings tab in their AdWords accounts. It’s listed as "Show additional links to my site" in the "Ad Extensions" section.

June 24, 2010
Flixster and BuddyTV Team Up on Ad Sales

Flixster has announced a partnership with BuddyTV, which involves the creation of an advertising platform to reach users of both networks.

Flixster says it has a U.S. audience of U.S. audience of over 20 million people a month, with an additional 7 million users on its mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm Pre. Of course it also has popular apps on Facebook, MySpace, and iGoogle, as well as the very popular Rotten Tomatoes. BuddyTV says it reaches 8 million a month.

"Together, Flixster and BuddyTV will reach more passionate entertainment influencers than anyone else in the market," says Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein. "This is a terrific partnership that capitalizes on each company’s growth in social networking, mobile and online to reach a huge and influential audience of trendsetting consumers."

"Combining the leading social and mobile entertainment sites in TV and movies provides advertisers with an opportunity to connect and surround digitally savvy entertainment consumers exactly when they are making decisions about how to spend their leisure time and leisure dollars," says James Smith, recently hired by Flixster to expand the company’s ad sales.

In fact, it is Flixster’s sales team that will handle the entire combination of Flixster, Rotten Tomatoes and BuddyTV in the U.S.

June 24, 2010
Microsoft and Mediabrands Announce Advertising Coalition Led by 4A’s

Today Microsoft Advertising and Mediabrands announced developments on the Media Operations Management System (M.O.M.S.), which is described as "an agency agnostic, enterprise-level architecture to connect the marketing ecosystem."

The M.O.M.S. project was launched a year ago. Since then, Mediabrands and Microsoft have expanded their team to include agency, publisher, data and industry trade organizations. The American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) is leading an industry-wide coalition to further develop the project.

"Today, marketers are continually forced to make decisions on imperfect information and suffer from a lack of truly actionable data. M.O.M.S was designed to unite a disconnected marketing ecosystem and inspire greater collaboration and innovation across our industry," says Quentin George, Chief Digital Officer of Mediabrands. "We began with an aggressive ambition and are ready for partners along the entire marketing spectrum to coalesce and help develop a truly integrated solution. We applaud the 4A’s for agreeing to develop a coalition that will change the future of our industry."

"Our agency partners constantly ask for solutions to meet key business needs and M.O.M.S. has great potential to address each of them via a supportive technology architecture that will enable interoperability and drive operational and economic efficiencies," says Nancy Hill, President and CEO of the 4 A’s. "Simply put, this is a way for agencies to finally realize the business and economic efficiencies that so many other businesses and industries have benefited from over the past 10 years. True industry collaboration will drive this forward and the 4A’s is committed to bringing together leaders who are willing to place a premium on advancing the cause of the industry as a whole and turning vision into action."

The 4A’s will announce details on the coalition members in the coming weeks.

Earlier this week, Mediabrands partnered with AOL on digital retail advertising.

June 23, 2010
Google Launches Ad News Site

Google has launched a new advertising news resource called simply "Google Ad News." It’s a site that is powered by Google News and various ad-related categories you can choose feeds from.

"The rapid pace of change in the advertising space can be dizzying," says Google business marketing manager Oliver Deighton. "From new ad formats to new ad systems, from startups to mergers, the marketing industry is running at a million miles an hour, and it’s often daunting to keep up with it all. We know that staying informed takes a lot of effort, and it’s critical to make good decisions about how you spend your time and resources."

At Google Ad News, you can choose to look at top advertising news, ad industry news, search advertising news, display advertising news, mobile advertising news, tv/radio/print advertising news, direct marketing news, or ad creative news. You can also search Google News from here, and of course you can subscribe to RSS feeds for any of the categories.

Google also includes feeds from the official Google Blog and the Inside AdWords Blog, as well as Google Ad Innovations, another resource the company launched in March.

June 23, 2010
Google to Retire AdWords Report Center

Google is making changes to reporting in AdWords. They’ve moved some of the reports from the Report Center to the Campaigns tab, and will do so with more as time goes on.

"Now you can use AdWords to see the search terms and automatic placements where your ads appeared, segment your data by things like keyword match type and day of week, and email and schedule downloads of the data you want to share," explains Emily Williams of Google’s Inside AdWords crew. "You can do it all on the same pages where you manage your campaigns, making finding key performance drivers (and acting on your discoveries) faster and easier."

"With so much useful data available within the Campaigns tab, the AdWords Report Center is no longer the best place to find new reports," adds Williams. "So, in order to build the most useful reporting tools possible, we plan to gradually move the existing reports from the Report Center into the Campaigns tab, then retire the Report Center entirely."

Google will move elements from every report in the center to the Campaigns tab over the coming weeks, and when a report becomes available in the Campaigns tab, they’ll remove the option to create that type of report in the Report Center. Reports that are already scheduled will run as planned.

Changes will only affect the Report Center on individual accounts, and will not affect My Client Center or TV Ads reports. More details about the transition can be found here.

June 22, 2010
AOL and Mediabrands Partner on Retail Advertising

AOL and Interpublic Group’s Mediabrands (one of the largest buyers of retail advertising in the U.S. ) have announced a digital retail advertising partnership. The two companies plan to align their collective resources and announce a Retail Advisory Board in the coming weeks.

“Mediabrands partners with top retail and CPG brands, and we are committed to investing in resources to develop innovative retail solutions beyond what currently exist in the marketplace today," said Bant Breen, President, Worldwide Digital Communications, Initiative. "AOL has a substantial audience of engaged shoppers that can provide critical insights into what consumers need to enrich their online retail experience. Those same insights can also help marketers create a consistent consumer experience with the local retail store. By partnering with AOL, we can leverage our collective assets in retail, consumer insights and hyper-local to re-invent the category."

The two companies will use research from IPG’s Lab to create a new online pre-shopping program that will be tested with key retailers throughout Q3 and Q4 2010. It will include five leading retail partners, and the companies say success will be measured against the creation of user training, in-store sales lift and the effectiveness of new advertising formats.

The companies plan to expand the partnership to create new solutions in Hyper-Local Marketing by leveraging Mediabrands’ Geomentum, a $2 billion local advertising agency, as well as AOL’s own hyper-local platform.

June 21, 2010
Microsoft Tests New Local Mobile Ad Product

Microsoft Mobile Advertising has started piloting a new local ad product for mobile. Geodelic, a third party publisher of a location-based discovery app is conducting the pilot.

"We are conducting this pilot to gain insights into end user behavior and engagement with local mobile ad products," says Raj Kapoor on the Microsoft Advertising Blog. "This ad product is geared towards driving store traffic for our advertisers, as well as to provide consumers with easy access to store details, directions and local offers."

Two advertisers participating in the pilot are Hyatt and Quiznos. Microsoft says pilot participants belong to local categories such as restaurants, services, travel, and shopping.

The pilot will launch in Los Angeles, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Seattle at first. It is served through Microsoft’s adCenter platform.

June 18, 2010
150,000+ Create Their Own Version of Google Super Bowl Ad (Toy Story 3 Included)

You may recall Google’s television commercial that played during the Super Bowl – "Parisian Love". This was Google’s first television advertisement, and YouTube says it led to over 150,000 users creating their own versions of it, as part of Google’s "Search Stories" campaign.

"It’s become a great example of how a brand can involve its audience in an ad campaign," YouTube says on its Biz Blog. "The effort continues to evolve with the first co-branded Search Story spot, released last week to coincide with this week’s opening of Toy Story 3. The video features a few characters you may well know and love (Buzz, Woody and the gang) sharing their own search story."

Google’s Robert Wong, Creative Director of Search Stories talks more about the campaign in that blog post. "Search has become so commonplace in our lives and when you take a step back you can see that your searches are actually marking time," says Wong. "In kind of the same way that pictures or songs might, they tell the story of your life. We thought this was a pretty cool notion. Then, from there, it was a natural evolution to stringing some searches together to make a story. Because at the end of the day, the best search results don’t just show up on a web page, they show up in someone’s life."

Google’s Search Stories have proven to be valuable, not just for those behind the videos, but for others that simply appear in the video. Back in February, after the Super Bowl, WebProNews talked to CEA, the first company featured in Google’s commercial who actually saw a big increase in traffic. Unfortunately, not everybody has the Super Bowl to promote their videos.

June 18, 2010