Google and You:The Online Profile That You Didn't Sign Up For

By:Gabriele Cimolino

Image by Rob Bulmahn

This is GGooooggllee.

Image by: Cory Doctorow

If you hadn't heard,

They run a search engine, an email service, a navigator, a video sharing site, a file hosting server and a bunch more.

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They also make phones, phone operating systems, phone applications, and now, phones that look like glasses.

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But, one thing that not many know is that they also run an incredibly large advertising program

that outsources Google advertisements to sites within the Google Network.

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In Q1 of 2013 Google Network Revenues made Google 3.26 billion dollars (or 25% of their total revenue) from advertising on non-Google sites alone.

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Ok, So...

How does this work?

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Google AdWords and AdSense operates majorly on a pay-per-click or Cost Per Mile

(CPM, a thousand units of advertisement) model.

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This means that every time that someone clicks on an ad that is displayed through the Google Network, or an ad is displayed a thousand times on a site, the advertiser makes money.

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This can be a lot of money for doing nothing,...

But for Google this is just the tip of the iceberg.

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The question for Google is “How do we get more people to click on ads?”

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The answer has developed, over time, to suit Google's offered services and the current privacy laws.

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In the beginning, advertisement placement was done simply by matching the ad's content with the content of the web page where it is displayed.

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There by, if you sell ping-pong balls your ad would be most likely to appear on websites pertaining to table tennis or beer pong.

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This was a good model for ad placement, however, in 2010 Google began to use referral URLs to track web sessions to more accurately place advertisements.

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Image by: Butch Lebo

Referral URLs were previously used to give credit to sites that hosted links to sites

that profited from advertising through Google.

Although the use of search information for the purpose of advertisement is done anonymously this is where web advertising gets a lot more intimate.

Image by: Chris Jobling

What happens when Google is no longer anonymous?

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As Google accounts continue to be created and are used for email service, online capabilities with phones, and Google's own web browser Chrome

Image by: Charlie Essers

Google learns more and more about you.

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In 2011, Google launched their own social networking site, Google+, in beta.

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And for the first time...

Google's users were actively giving Google their personal information.

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Your internet usage is no longer anonymous... But maybe it's not such a bad thing.

Image by: Quinn Norton

Google's information about your online self could be used for far more malevolent activities than advertising.

Image by: Christoph Boecken

And with Google's current heading, this is not likely to change, unless we let it.

Image by: Brian Talbot

Sources

http://googlepress.blogspot.ca/2003/06/google-expands-advertising-monetization.htmlhttp://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/advertising/allhttp://money.cnn.com/2010/02/12/technology/google_adsense/index.htmhttp://investor.google.com/earnings/2013/Q1_google_earnings.htmlhttps://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497941?hl=en