There’s something to be said for monopolies. Obviously, they’re great when you own one but they have another advantage too.
They make life easier.
They don’t make life better. But they do make life easier.
Just think how much time you’d save if you were to walk into a supermarket and find only one type of bread and one brand of laundry powder and one sort of breakfast cereal. The bread might taste like chalk, the laundry powder might make your clothes dirty and the breakfast cereal might be made of sawdust… but at least it would be easy to decide what to buy.
It doesn’t sound good, does it? Competition might create work for consumers who have to make informed choices but it’s worth it.
That’s as true about contextual ad systems as it is about anything else.
Although Google is still miles ahead of anyone else, it’s not the only company that can put contextualized ads on your website. For the moment I wouldn’t swap AdSense for anything else… but that doesn’t mean I haven’t considered it.
In fact, I consider it all the time. I’m always stopping by at YPN to see what Yahoo! is up to. I make it a habit to look in at Kontera and Chitika to see if they’ve got any new products.
When Intellitxt started putting videos in contextualized ad balloons, my eyes lit up and I rushed over to see what they were doing.
And as soon as eBay and Microsoft started their contextualized ad Betas, I was reading around the Web to find out what they were paying and whether AdSense was about to have a fight on its hands.
So far, I haven’t seen anything to persuade me that I can earn more money with Google’s competition. But I am glad they’ve got some and I make it my business to be certain that every time I decide to stay with Google, that decision is an informed one.
You should do the same thing.
Keep an eye on Google’s competition. Know who they are, follow what they’re doing and understand what they might be able to do for you. It’s possible that one day you might have to make a real choice about your ad supplier.