Seen In the Wild
I was reading a piece on Venturebeat, on Kutano. And this ad was at the bottom. — This is an ad? — Yep. Innaresting. Four years ago (God, yes, I've been writing for more than that, er, ummm....22 years, in fact...) anyway, I wrote this about Google and the need to market its products:
Context & Ripple Effects
By early 2009 the running question in this coverage had been how far Google could push its ad auction into other people's media — first television with its experiment in TV ad sales, then a print-ad auction run through Inside AdWords, and most provocatively an AdSense-style play aimed at Facebook. John Battelle's short 'seen in the wild' post flips the telescope: instead of Google selling ads everywhere, it shows a startup (Kutano) buying a plain display unit at the bottom of a VentureBeat story — and prompts him to dust off his old argument that Google itself, famously grown on word-of-mouth rather than campaigns, eventually has to market its own products.
First-order effects
- A small startup like Kutano treats conventional display placement on a tech blog as a viable way to reach exactly the Google-literate audience that matters to it — evidence that even in Google's shadow, ordinary web advertising still does distribution work.
- Battelle's musing re-opens the question he posed years earlier about Google's go-to-market posture: whether a company built on organic adoption can keep relying on it as its product surface expands.
Second-order effects
- As Google extends its auction machinery across formats — print slots sold like keywords, TV inventory, social placements — publishers gain one clearinghouse for their ad space, which pressures standalone ad sellers and intermediaries on price.
- If the biggest brands and startups increasingly meet their audiences through Google-run pipes, competitors building rival surfaces (social networks, portals) face pressure to either plug into Google's network or defend their own direct-sales economics.
Third-order effects
- The structural endpoint of this pattern is Google as the market where attention itself is priced: even companies whose businesses compete with or bypass Google end up bidding inside its systems to be seen.
- Whether Google ever truly needs to advertise anywhere but its own properties remains genuinely unresolved — the corpus records the argument recurring without a settled answer, making it a durable test case for how far organic adoption can substitute for marketing.
The trend: This is one data point in Google's long transformation from a company that grew without advertising into the universal infrastructure through which everyone else — including would-be challengers — buys attention.