Google Video Search: Offers paid and free content. Its new Video Store of paid content includes NBA games, Brady Bunch reruns, Olympic events, Super Bowl commercials and Kelly Clarkson videos. Free content includes a compilation of Family Guy excerpts featuring Jesus, random lip-synching videos and footage of an octopus eating a shark, among others.
Google News: Aggregates news stories and images. The selection and placement of stories on this page are determined automatically by a computer program and features more than 30 international versions of the site. It doesn't currently incorporate advertising into the news presentation.
Blogger: Designed to help people have their own voice on the web via blogs, is one of the most common blog services and incorporates AdSense as a revenue option for bloggers. And Google developed a blog search engine for users to find what bloggers have to say.
Google Page Creator: This just-launched service allows Gmail users to create a web site for free, with a generous 100MB of web storage and lots of bandwidth. Page Creator is an alternative to blogger. Where bloggers post frequently, Page Creator is intended for people who want to create more stable sites
orkut: Google's social network, allowing users to connect with other orkut users via other orkut users.
Other players include
Video: iTunes, YouTube, Brightcove, TiVo, Yahoo Entertainment
News: CNN, Yahoo, Reuters
Blogs & social networks: MySpace, TypePad, Friendster, LiveJournal
What this could mean for marketers
At the moment, Google does not serve AdWords into news searches-- probably because advertisers might worry about their brand sitting next to something like a story about suicide bombers. The news service is another arm of the company's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
With Blogger, similar to its approach with Gmail (See "Email, IM & Voice"), Google has made itself the de facto standard for anybody starting a blog -- it's free and easy -- and can even generate revenue through AdSense. While the bloggers might earn some money, the real benefit for both Google and marketers is the extension of AdSense into much of that blog inventory. Google deserves kudos for making it an opt-in rather than opt-out choice. Fickle bloggers might otherwise have turned elsewhere en masse.
Orkut is Google's answer to MySpace, the dominant social network that was recently acquired by News Corp.
Google's move into video, on the other hand, affords marketers some interesting new promotional opportunities. Not only can marketers upload videos about their products to the store, but they can also sponsor free video within search listings. See, for example, this screenshot from the simple search for "Olympics" performed during the February games.
According to the site Paid Content , NBC and Google worked out a deal in which 15 second clips from the games would live on Google, linking to NBC's site for the full video.
And that's just the beginning. How long until some marketers are able to sponsor a video on Google that would otherwise cost consumers money to see? Consumers are accustomed to commercials within video, and a January study by the Points North Group showed that consumers even prefer watching commercials to paying for TV Shows on-demand. Imagine, for example, a beverage company sponsoring the first 10,000 downloads of an episode of "CSI"? It might own all four ad pods of the episode, and in all likelihood that would cost less than a broadcast :30.
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