Mountain View, California — In an attempt to sideline its another unprofitable service, search engine titan Google over the weekend said it is shuttering its 5-year-old Google TV Ads platform in favor web advertising including its own Google TV. Accordingly, the company blames the demise of its 5-year-old Google TV Ads platform, and said that the move was prompted by the booming popularity of watching content across a variety of mobile devices, Google said.
Google introduced the TV ads division in 2007 when it appeared that any form of advertising might be accommodating to AdWords-style pricing mechanics and placement. Even today, the company advertises the capability to “target up to 42 million U.S. households” via networks such as ESPN and CNN.
As a matter of fact, it is worth noting that the TV ads program, which was promoted by Google in an attempt to revolutionize the way advertising is sold on TV for small businesses to reach new customers and build a strong brand, and as an effective addition to the media plan of large advertisers. Google offered to bring its digital buying and measurement technologies, including its set-top box network, to traditional TV advertising.
“We introduced Google TV Ads in AdWords to bring digital buying and measurement technologies to traditional TV advertising,” said Google executive Shishir Mehrotra in a blog post.
Nevertheless, Google has never been very fortunate in selling ads outside of its core competency. Newspaper and radio ads sales were killed in 2009, and some contemplated that TV ads would be next. The product never reached scale, and networks were somewhat suspicious of the new kid on the block. All of Google’s success stores listed on the Google TV Ads site are small, little-known companies: DynoMighty, SelectQuote, Currituck Visitors Bureau.
Furthermore, video is increasingly going digital and users are now watching across numerous devices. “So we have made a pretty tough decision to close our TV Ads product over the next few months and move the team to other areas at Google,” Mehrotra said.
The company finally said that it will be “doubling down” on video solutions for its clients, like YouTube, AdWords for Video, and ad serving tools for web video publishers. “We also identify opportunities to help users access web content on their TV screens, through products like Google TV,” Mehrotra said.
Certainly, part of this is a somewhat portrays an embarrassing failure, to be sure. But a much bigger part of this is that the future of video content is the Internet.
But, regardless on a small screen, laptop, tablet, or large living room screen, video is increasingly moving towards web models of access and delivery. And in that sense, Google made no stupid move to jump from that which is not growing to that which is!