unexpected and unfortunate

Google did something very big yesterday. I don't think enough people appreciate the magnitude of their latest move in mobile, nor the unfortunate effects it is likely to have. Now let me preface this by saying that since AdMob competes with Google I encourage you to do your own research and form your own opinion

Yesterday Google told their hundreds of thousands of AdWords customers that they would be including ALL ads in their mobile search results. The one proviso was that they had to be able to transcode your page. In other words, if you do not make heavy use of flash or ajax you are pretty much in. They said that it would be free until 11/18 and then they would start charging unless you opted out.

I'm not sure everyone appreciates just how sub-optimal a transcoded experience can be. Transcoding technology works well if you are simply looking for a particular piece of information on a site and you need to get access to it while you are on your phone. It is not, however, the way that you would want to present your company to a potential customer if you were given the choice. Especially if you were paying for it. If you would like to see what a transcoded version of your site *might* look like you can simply type in your URL into their mobile search box. I say "might" because on most devices things end quite a bit worse than this.

What suffers most is the user experience. Google argued (and was probably right) that online search advertising could in many cases enhance the experience for users. Oftentimes, users actually seek out paid advertisements on search results due to the fact that they feel that if someone is paying for their visit, they must have a relevant and compelling offering. Transcoded results will simply not satisfy this expectation.

Let's be clear. I have been anxious and excited about Google's entry into mobile for a long time. I wrote about this extensively here, here, and here. How could the mobile market not benefit from hundreds of thousands of new advertisers learning about mobile when Google came? Wouldn't it be fantastic when they spent the time and money to expose their users to mobile specific content and educate their advertisers on the nuances of mobile? Unfortunately, it doesn't look like much of that is going to happen.

It didn't make any sense at the very beginning of the web when people scanned their brochures and put them up as websites, and it doesn't make any sense to take an advertiser’s website and try to squeeze it into a mobile device. Mobile is and will be a different medium. Most of Google’s advertisers are focused on conversion and ROI. I challenge you to purchase something or fill out a 5 page form on one of their transcoded pages. The worst part is that now, rather than getting excited about mobile, there will be hundreds of thousands of advertisers and millions of users whose first experience with mobile advertising is a bad one.

No one benefits from this. Users are not better off and advertisers are certainly not better off. Frankly, I don't even think Google is better off. As a member of the mobile ecosystem I can’t help thinking that this is a huge opportunity lost, and it's a shame.