In a major change to its policies and its whiter than white ethical stance Google is set to announce tomorrow that it will begin allowing gambling advertisers onto its Adwords programme according a a breaking NMA article.
This is major news for the gambling sector as for many years now they have toiled with the use of just Yahoo, MSN and in the old days Miva to drive their PPC traffic and basically survived on 20% of the search market. This announcement by Google will open up a massive new revenue stream for them which was previously only semi available through out of hours bidding and “play for free” sites to bypass the Google systems.
There were over 11,000,000 searches for poker on Google in September and nearly 3,000,000 for gambling which shows the extent to which gambling sites without a strong SEO presence were missing out. Thousands of new players will become available once the changes take place for those quick enough to act on the news and hit the market before it becomes too expensive.
The pickup might not be as swift as you might think though as it is expected that new advertisers will have to provide documented evidence of their gambling license and if the process is as convoluted and long winded as the old trademark protection procedure then advertisers would be waiting a long time to actually see their ads live! This does however discount affiliate advertisers looking to make a quick buck out of the change.
So to the question of why has Google made this decision? Their third quarter earnings are announced today and the figures aren’t expected to be great! 11,000,000 searches on poker, 3,000,000 on gambling, let’s work on a £1 CPC for now (though I can guarantee it will be higher!) and a click through rate of 5% (this too will be higher when all ads are accounted for). This amounts to a another £700,000 monthly revenue for Google, that’s £8.4 million annual turnover added overnight! That’s going to affect your share price! And this is just with my extremely conservative figures; the reality is likely to be a lot higher.
It just goes to show, that even the most ethical of company stances can fall by the wayside when it comes down to profit!
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Pingback: » Google Gambling Uturn - who does it affect? The Digital Lookout