Making money out of Maps This is a long pending post.

Search? Making money out of Search? yeah ok. We have a 200 billion dollar company doing that right. Social networking? Facebook is trying out a few things and they are likely to crack it sooner than anybody else.

Now making money out of Maps? Now that is a complicated problem. In my opinion, nobody has quite solved this. Yahoo and Mapquest stick to what are best at. Banner advertising. But with the advent of Mashable maps (Ajaxified maps), you just have one page to do all you want. Real estate is prime and crunching a banner ad there ends up being ugly. I have always disliked the ad at the bottom left corner of Yahoo Maps.

Now, Google has tried a few things too. They have tried to sneak in their adwords in. But then again, 75% of the page is maps and there is only so much you can do with the right pane which is already so full of local results and driving directions instruction set and what not. Plus, it hardly and rarely makes use of the biggest context available. "Geography". In other words, "location".

Yahoo then tried the branding with the "See these business locations on the map" bottom bar. Now it is quite static with no intelligence. And like I argued earlier, and only slightly makes use of the fact there is a location context. Plus, It suits only those business that have a wide (nation wide) presence. In other words, businesses that are chains. It simply refuses to cater to the needs of the long tail.

Also, Maps is a very unique service. Most online services and properties tries to keep the person online. It works by the charm of referrals. But maps works the other way around. The user actually wants to get offline. He wants to get off the internet and get going somewhere. Most Ad models and networks are not best suited for this. They all work in a "Click here to go to the site" way when I want to get off my chair.

A real long time ago ( a year or two ago) Google was trying to sneak in a few sponsored listings as markers on the map. In a given map view, you will find (different looking) markers strewn all over the place. Once clicked, it will tell you about a restaurant or a book store with the phone number etc. Somehow, that has disappeared. Mostly because they didnt find enough interest in the advertising community.

Most recently, I came across Lat49 which is trying to do the same thing. They have tied up with a bunch of map services and hacks (on top of Gmaps and Yahoo maps etc). As an advertiser, you gotta go and buy rights for an area (location context) and place your ad. Everytime anyone see that particular area on any of those Mapping partners, your ad will be displayed.

I think this is the way it needs to proceed. Because fundamentally, the context is location. Not keywords, not your IP, Not the referral page. It is like you are driving to that coffee shop you love the most, but the book store exists on the way. Whether you like it or not. From such a perspective, these ads stop looking like ads anymore. Right?

Now the real challenge is to generate interest in those physical businesses. They need to educated that it is possible to promote their physical store just as well and easy as their online store. It is even possible to advertise on the internet even if you are not online. And that Advertising on Maps is the way to go about it.

What do you think?

Labels: advertising, geoadvertising, lat49, maps, monetizing

  ¶ 9:13 PM Permalink