Google Finance Adds AdSense Ads

Google recently added a big ugly AdSense block to Google Finance. It looks poorly integrated and noisy.

I am surprised they didn't look to take a page out of Yahoo!'s book on this front. Yahoo!'s ads offer more in the lines of branding, and they also sell custom research reports (likely on a CPA model).

Anyone who thinks Google has fully tapped out its revenue potential needs to be reminded that Google and YouTube are leading downstream destinations from Google.

Did you know that when a company ranks #1 on a Google Map with 10 results and #1 in the organic search results that the organic result only gets 60% more traffic? But there are 10 links in the onebox...which means that as a whole they probably get more traffic than the top organically ranked site does, especially on smaller browsers.

One interesting fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024×768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024×768 or under. This makes sense because the lower the resolution of the screen the more real estate the Onebox listing gets “above the fold.”

Many of these onebox and universal search destinations (Finance, maps/local, product search, real estate, movies, travel, video, lyrics, books, and perhaps even images) can be monetized at much higher rates than whatever AdSense is yielding, and Google sees all the AdWords data, so they can tackle any new vertical they want (employment? education? healthcare? finance? ) and compete based on under-monetizing themselves in the short term, aggressive launch-time public relations, and giving themselves free traffic from the search results.

Google will take a leadership position in new markets like voice and video chat and voice search.

As long as Google does not destroy their brand, punt on user privacy, raise anti-trust concerns, or lose a major copyright battle they have lots of upside left. Google defines the new digital economy.