Google Lists Top 1,000 Sites On The Web & Then Lets You Advertise On Them
The Google AdWords blog announced new features for Google Ad Planner and AdWords content network today. — The big news is that Google publicly released a list of the top 1,000 sites by unique users as measured by Ad Planner.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google is opening up data it had kept behind its 2008-vintage media planning tool: Ad Planner launched two years ago as a research utility for planners, and today Google published its top-1,000-sites-by-unique-users list openly while wiring those same rankings into AdWords buys. The move follows Google's earlier work tightening how ads rank on the content network, including the revised top-ad placement formula from 2007.
What makes the release notable is that Google is simultaneously the largest seller of display inventory through AdWords, the operator of the measurement tool counting the users, and now the publisher of a de facto league table of the web. For buyers, reach estimates that once lived inside planning tools become a menu of purchasable targets.
First-order effects
- Advertisers on the AdWords content network can now target the web's highest-reach sites directly from Ad Planner data, collapsing what was a manual media-buying research step into a campaign setup choice.
Second-order effects
- Publishers that make the top 1,000 gain a programmatic demand channel alongside their direct sales teams, while sites just below the cutoff face pressure to grow measured unique users to stay visible to planners.
Third-order effects
- If Google's own counts become the reference ranking for web audiences, third-party audience measurement loses pricing power and display buying consolidates around a single platform's definition of reach.
The trend: Display advertising is converging on Google's auction-and-measurement stack, with the company's internal traffic data becoming the public currency for who matters on the web.