Those of you who use Google Finance to track the implosion of your stock portfolio have probably noticed that they've moved the graph that tracks the Dow and the S&P over to make room for a big box of ads.
I'm curious why they did that. Not only does it look a little out of place, but do people really go to Google Finance looking to buy something? If they offered a cheap way to buy stock, I could understand that. But the ad it's showing me now is "Free Grants for Finances", whatever that means. It doesn't seem to really fit in with their typical strategy of unobtrusive, targeted ads.
I suppose it doesn't cost them anything, and could bring in plenty of money, but it could also backfire by annoying long-time users like me by taking up a pretty large chunk of prime screen real estate.
I hope they don't make any money off the ads and decide to remove them.
Dear Jon Socialist
Dear Jon Socialist Obamamamma,
Believe it or not, Google isn't a socialist movement. If they don't make money off their finance pages, they'll stop providing content. GOSH!!
- D. O. Reality
Dear guy who doesn't really
Dear guy who doesn't really pay attention to what I post,
1) I didn't say they couldn't put ads there. I said they were annoying and I don't think they're going to do that well where they've placed them. I understand they're trying to make a profit, I just don't think this going to be successful.
2) They've been providing the page for a long time with no ads. Sure, their profits are probably getting crunched, but I don't think they believe this is the answer. They put up the page because they have all that info anyway - it probably took them a week of work to create the finance home page from web services they had in place already. That is, they probably don't make money off that page, never have, and if this is the way they try to do it, never will. They put up the page because they'd done most of the work already for other things, and this is one more way to get people using Google products.
3) It doesn't look like they spent much time on this. Their ads tend to better, I think, when they seem part of the page. These look like they were just shoved into the corner.
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