Google now sells advertising space on its Play app store. The new ads will be similar to Google’s Adwords, which helps businesses spread the word about their goods or services through the search engine. Fortunately, the new ads won’t be displayed in the middle of the text or be displayed automatically. The ads will appear in the list when a user searches a query that applies to the advertised app. For instance, if someone searched for music apps, they would see an ad for a music-related app at the top of the list.
Google’s history of advertising
Google’s paid advertisement programs were designed to help smaller businesses promote their services to compete with larger companies. The only problem with some of the advertising programs is that they are open to click-fraud and competitive click rates that don’t help small businesses.
Paid search results only represent 6% of all web traffic. With such low numbers, it is a wonder why small businesses would use the website to promote their services. Google has about $50 billion+ in advertising revenues from businesses. But this is the first time Google is opening up the Google Play store to businesses for advertising opportunities. Human curators or algorithms helped app developers select app content displayed in the store.
Advertising on Google Play could prove fruitful
Google’s rival Apple doesn’t have paid advertising in its App Store, but one analyst thinks Google is making a smart decision. Mark May, an analyst for Citigroup, predicts that Google could generate up to $3 billion in high-margin revenue by next year. However, his predictions still depend on various factors, namely, how fast Google Play can scale up the new ad program.
Time will tell if Google’s latest ad program is a success for developers and the search giant.
