As mentioned previously, Google’s rise to being such a huge company was due to its advertising, or more specifically, text-based advertising. Now what did Google do that made its consumers and customers so happy that these AdWords became so successful? According to Randell Stross, in his book Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, he mentioned how Brin and Page, the company’s founders were adamant about allowing advertising in their search engine. They have even criticized search engines that were funded by advertisers and stated that they were “inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers”. Therefore, when they started Google, Brin and Page were apprehensive about allowing advertising in Google. After a few meetings, they decided to introduce advertising as an experiment, restricting the format to three very short lines of text and a Web address, and the link will only appear when the consumer types on a keyword or a relevant search term, hereby creating the text-advertisement. Also, the advertiser will only have to pay if the visitor clicks on the advertiser’s link, offering advertisers a risk-free solution to their advertising problem.
However, the initial text advertisements were displayed so little that they went largely unseen. Even a year on since its inception, analysts and journalists still could not understand how Google could make money from such an advertising system. The only source of income that was apparent was the outsourcing of Google’s search engine to other larger companies such as Yahoo!, that at that time it seemed to be as good a revenue as advertising. The whole text-advertising idea was so unorthodox that even some of Google’s employees felt that Google will sooner or later succumb to having banners in their home page. However, these unprepossessing text advertisements were slowly but surely gaining popularity amongst the advertisers, being one of the most cost effective innovations in the recent years. Instead of conducting mass advertising to those who may not want to hear of see that advertisement, Google allowed them to reach those consumers who needs that product or service, allowing a better reception to the advertisement and obviously a higher success rate. This proved to sparked the economical growth in Google and to date, approximately US$16.5 billion or revenue were funded by these text-advertising alone, with 99% of its revenue still generated by those simple text advertisements. Indeed, these text-ads formed the basis of truthfulness that a truthful business can boom into a true money making industry, without relying on the unscrupulous bombardment of advertisements to an unreceptive customer. This can also relate to companies that want to stick by the rules and not play “dirty”, and the Google story can inspire them in that way.
