What’s Wrong With Google’s New TV Show Model

Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane is making a series of cartoons that will only be available through Google AdSense banners, posted to sites where the target demographic already hangs out.

This is a good idea…if you’re selling the TV show, or advertising on the TV show, or if you’re Google. It’s not so great if you’re the publisher, or another advertiser on the site. Here’s why.

Assuming that the show is popular (and it will be, at least initially), it won’t be long before a list of the lucky sites gets posted somewhere under a header that reads “Here’s where to find Seth McFarlane’s Google TV show.” Fans will then go to those sites and obsessively refresh the pages until they see the show. Then, most likely, they’ll leave the site.

All those refreshes that happen before the TV show loads? That’s wasted inventory. Some other advertiser paid for it, and now their branding impact and CTR will plummet while each impression lasts a fraction of a second.

And those pageviews will affect the sites’s estimates of their own inventory, which they use to sell to other advertisers. Estimates will have to be adjusted from “we get a million pageviews per month” to “we get two million pageviews per month, but only when McFarlane’s show appears on AdSense, and when that happens, half the impressions are wasted if you’re any other advertiser.” And don’t forget: If you’re another advertiser, then when the McFarlane ads are running, you’re not just competing with the other ad placements you scoped out before you did the media buy. You’re also competing with ads within the show. And if you’re the publisher, please take note that you will not be collecting revenue for those ads-within-ads. Once word gets out that you’re one of the sites on which the show will appear, premium advertisers interested in running on your site will get to choose between dealing directly with you, and dealing with Media Rights.

The TV-show-seeking-pageviews will also affect the sites’ internal analytics oddly. Did traffic spike on Wednesday because the new McFarlane episode was released, or because of interest in the new article? Sure, you might be able to make an educated guess based on referral URLs and other tricks. But it’s going to be hard. Google doesn’t tell its publishers which ads are going to appear on which pages, and it doesn’t provide a record of what ads were shown on your site after the fact, either.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly: Premium websites are designed very carefully for an optimum user experience, and this is not it. The content is supposed to be the primary attraction, the ads secondary, and sites are created with this in mind…not just in terms of the visual layout, but also in terms of the way the articles are written.

Note that I’m not talking about integrated, co-branded campaigns here. These are AdSense ads, which means that the publisher can’t control when they appear, or whether they appear at all (although ads from a certain domain can be prevented from appearing).

So here’s what I suggest, if you are one of the affected publishers. Set up a special page for the McFarlane show, and let your users know that if they want to see it, that’s the page to refresh. If you have AdSense on any other pages, block the appropriate domain for the AdSense on those pages. And then design special content around the ad placement that you’re setting aside for the TV show. Design the whole page around it. And come up with little tricks for distracting people from the show, and getting them interested in the rest of your site.

Highly targeted house ads. Like white blood cells, isolating and protecting the rest of the organism a substance that has turned against its host.

pic of Family Guy pinball machine by Ralph Hockens