Skip to content

Comment on Google’s AMP Poised to Take the Lead from Facebook’s and Apple’s Walled Gardens

Comments

From the article: "...most ad servers (not just Google-owned DFP) will be able to send ads in AMP pages. Some work remains to be done on the formats that will be deemed acceptable in AMP pages." Deemed acceptable by who, and doesn't this indicate it will become another walled garden?

Not quite? It's talking about format, not content. Content would make it definitely a walled-garden.

Not sure why you were down-voted as it is a legit question.

I'd honestly be pretty surprised if they didn't just opt to support all IAB-approved ad formats. The one format I could see being a big question mark is "native ads." Outside of their increased Gmail ad presence, Google has been curiously absent from the native advertising landscape.

Google has been curiously absent from the native advertising landscape. Compare: https://stratechery.com/2014/peak-google/

Ah--love Ben's blog and podcast (listen to it several times a week during my commute).

His point is a good one. In terms of feeds of potential branding interest, beyond Youtube, Google's big (and mostly untapped) opportunity is in Gmail.

They made a stride to first assert control and doing users a favor by moving things to the Promotions tab. Now they have their ads in the email "feed" in that tab. The Inbox product, IMHO, was their attempt at redefining email into an fully algorithmically-curated feed ala FB, Twitter and Reddit.

My personal bet is that Inbox was a proof of concept and they will force Gmail to shift to that approach in the not too distant future. If users don't leave en masse, I would not be surprised at all to see Google forcing advertisers to pay to get into the inboxes of Gmail users--even users who have explicitly asked for promotional emails. That was FB's brilliant gambit (that somewhat blew up in their face). They convinced advertisers to invest in building an audience on the FB platform (so FB owned the audience), let them see revenue from it, and then switched from a "communicate all you like to everyone who Likes you for free!" model to a "pay us on an auction model if you want to reach anyone" model. Many advertisers consider it a huge bait-and-switch play, but I can't deny that it seems to have been successful. And that is why I won't be surprised to see Google follow suit there.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.