Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View
According to a new patent that was just granted to Google, the company could soon extend the reach of its advertising program in Google Maps to Street View. This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google had already explored the idea of a digital billboard ad network in 2007, and its Street View advertising discussion four days earlier framed Street View as potential ad inventory rather than only a mapping feature. The newly granted patent gives that line of thinking a more concrete technical and intellectual-property footing.
The significance is the proposed bridge between the physical advertising already captured in Street View imagery and Google’s map-based advertising business: the company is considering making a static, dated real-world ad surface changeable inside its digital map product.
First-order effects
- Google can treat selected billboard imagery in Street View as advertising placements that can be updated independently of the underlying street photography.
- Advertisers seeking map users gain a proposed placement format tied to a visible physical location, alongside Google’s existing Maps-oriented advertising ambitions.
Second-order effects
- Billboard operators and local advertisers would face a split between the ad shown on the street and the ad shown to people navigating the same location through Google Maps.
- Google’s mapping product becomes more commercially entangled with the businesses depicted in its imagery, increasing the value of keeping location and visual data usable for advertising.
Third-order effects
- If Google deploys the patent’s approach, Street View would move toward a hybrid media layer where representations of physical infrastructure can be sold and refreshed like online inventory.
- The broader shift is toward location products monetizing not just search results or map listings, but the visual surfaces within digital versions of real places.
The trend: Google is testing how its mapping and Street View assets can turn location-aware visual context into advertising inventory.