IP Democracy: More From Mayer on the Google-AOL Deal

John Battelle and Danny Sullivan both provide meaty posts based on recent conversations with Marissa Mayer, Google’s vp of search products and user experience about her company’s pending deal with AOL.

In her conversation with Batelle, Mayer restates a point made in an earlier blog post: “with banner ads we are comfortable saying that they will not appear on the home page and that they will not appear on the result pages.” Battelle then asked whether banner ads “might appear on Gmail or Google News, or somewhere else.” Mayer responded that:

Gmail and Google News weren’t thrown out (as examples). What we actually agreed to and committed to in the contract is that we would experiment with showing banner ads on properties where we think they are more suitable. And the two properties that are specifically mentioned as an “e.g.” are Google Image search and Google Video. Which kind of makes sense - if you are looking at pictures or videos it makes more sense to have a picture ad or an animated ad.

Sullivan’s post discusses placement of non-banner graphical ads:

Yes, non-banner units may be coming to Google search results pages, Mayer said. AOL raised the idea with Google of some type of icon-like display unit that might run in conjunction with text ads and which might be helpful in building brand recognition. Google’s agreed this is something that might be tested.

Sullivan and Mayer also discussed the possibility of ads on Google Personalized Home Pages:

“On the personalized home page, we do know things about you, what weather you’re looking for, what stocks, what news. So it’s more plausible to me,” Mayer said. However, she stressed that there are no immediate plans for ads of any type…When and if graphical ads should come, there’s a slight chance they could be of the banner format. But far more likely, they’d be something completely different, Mayer said. Google would be looking for a display unit that was fresh and worked well with the geometry of that page, which currently uses a more rectangular “module” format.

One of the more interesting things covered in Battelle’s interview with Mayer is AOL’s treatment with regard to Google’s OneBox, which appears at the top of some search results.

What we normally do on the OneBox, like on our stocks page or travel, where we have links to a few providers, we look at Media Metrix or Pagerank data, and generally they agree and corroborate themselves (as to) who are the top three or five providers. And those are who we generally look to include. We make sure to look at the overall user experience — you know do these people have a good page for us to click through to? So with the travel providers what we were looking for is do you get a results page that shows you flights?…We looked at who was willing to provide us a page that was suitable and accessible.

In response to Battelle’s question about whether the deal provides AOL with any guarantees related to OneBox inclusion, Mayer said what Google “committed to is that [AOL] will be included when they have a materially equivalent service.”

Batelle followed up with a question about whether the agreement includes any specifics beyond this “materially equivalent” criteria. Mayer’s reply suggested that the broader language was agreeable to both parties, in part because “[w]e couldn’t specify all the future one boxes they wanted to be in or anticipate how we might change the OneBoxes we do have.”

When Batelle expressed skepticism that AOL’s lawyers would not push for more specific language related to the OneBox agreement, Mayer reminded him “where we are in the deal. We’ve agreed to terms, but the actual contract is to be specified in the next 90 days…I don’t know what is going to happen, but terms are usually short, and contracts can be hundreds of pages, and we haven’t gone through that process…So I think we know the terms, and the terms are general, and there is a possibility they will become more specific during the process.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on December 28, 2005 10:30 PM to IP Democracy