iGoogle, Personalization and the iAdvertising Revolution

Google today rechristened its personalized homepage iGoogle. As part of the relaunch, they added a number of personalization features. Google Blogoscoped has an excellent run-down of all of the new goodies. This is the second round of personalized services that the company has launched in the last few weeks. If you want to, you can also now track your entire surfing history on Google's servers.

According to Marissa Mayer, tens of millions of users have personalized their iGoogle pages. How many of them are registered users remains unclear. This compares favorably with Yahoo's 50 million My Yahoo users, which is a significantly more mature platform. Further, iGoogle is one of the company's fastest growing services.

A personalized online experience is definitely advantageous. However, studies have shown that few actually want it. A Forrester analysis released last October found that 29% of users put a high priority on personalization. The same study found that only half of users who have a customized page actually use it. Further, only 21% feel relevant ads are part of a good online experience (see charts below).

What this means is that for all of the hype around personalization and ad targeting, the reality is that it only is attractive to a certain type of consumer - usually a power user. I suspect that many of you are part of this group, as am I. For years I was a My Yahoo user. Now I make tremendous use of these two Google features. Lots of people I talk to also seem to becoming fans of personalized start pages.

Further, I also like when the ads match what I am looking for. I find the ads in Gmail and search engines to be quite valuable. Still, if you believe the data (as I do), my habits clearly reflect the minority.

The march toward sophisticated personalized services that can tailor content (including ads) to one's needs will not be stopped. However, this creates a massive culture chasm. One one side we have users that will want personalized advertising/content and on the other we have people who will stop at nothing to avoid it. There are lots of shades of grey in between too.

Where this all leads is that Google will eventually create two tiers of services. They will create the means to allow power-users, should they wish, to sell (yes, I said sell) access to select cuts or all of their clickstream and personalization data. The information will get aggregated with those of others. This will create a superior personalized experience for those who want it and one-to-one advertising relevancy that goes far beyond anything we have today. People who opt-in to such a program will be rewarded based on how much data they generate and the return they deliver to Google's advertisers.

The vast majority of users will steer clear of such Big Brotherhood. In fact, such a concept is so controversial that if Google were to introduce it they might need to set up another brand to make it work.

Whether I am right or wrong remains to be seen. However, the trends are unmistakable. Google and other publishers desperately want you to personalize your experience so they can serve you the right mix of relevant content/ads. However, only a small few want it. That's a direct clash in interests. To meet this bifurcated audience and the advertisers who are desperate to reach them in an increasingly cluttered world, we will need multiple tiers of services. Watch for this to pop up in the next few years.

Comments

[Shayne McKinney]

My igoogle update caused my google homepage to go back in time to last year. I lost every change made in the last year. It is still customized like I had it a year ago, anyone else have this problem. I put a post on it on my webpage www.shaynemckinney.com

[Paul Walker]

Nice post, Steve. I'll have to look at the Forrester report. Something tells me Gen Y in general may be more into personalization that older demographics. Hope all is well.

PW

[Kevin Gamble]

To compare sites like Netvibes, iGoogle, or Pageflakes to My Yahoo or My MSN is quite a leap. The portal is a tired concept. Personal collections of widgets is a completely different matter.

This trend hasn't even started to take off, and the average person if asked, would be completely unaware that these new personalized sites even exist. I'm thinking they will be the way that the average user is introduced to syndication feeds, and that they are going to be huge. People just don't know enough to know what they don't know.

[B2BCurt]

STEVE. I AGREE WITH YOUR PREMISE OF GOOGLE COMING UP WITH TWO TIERS OF SERVICE, BUT TO CREATE A SEPARATE BRAND FOR ONE SEEMS A BIT OVERARCHING.

[Cat]

Hey Steve -- Given the research you share, I am clearly an early adopter because I LOVE iGoogle. Having the weather in my three favorite cities, news headlines from my favorite papers, AMAZING daily horoscopes (seriously, they are so good they are the first thing I log onto each day), and an inspirational thought of the day -- all on the same Google search page that I visit about 100 times a day anyway to search, check my gmail and log onto my blogger account is a serious value to me. Love it. I have always been a Google enthusiast and they havent let me down with this newest ditty. I don't know how I ever lived without it.

[David Scott Lewis]

We're all early adopters; let's pat ourselves on the back!! (I'm being sarcastic.) The real problem is separating early adopters from only adopters. Sometimes early adopters become in fact the only adopters. In essence, the chasm is never crossed.

However, I'll take exception to the Forrester findings for one reason: Personalization isn't easy. But what if it were?

If personalization were easy, were similar to what happens with Amazon, then it would have a lot more adherents. But to play around with widgets is a geek thing and not for the masses.

Amazon gets it right. Amazon is hardly perfect, but it's the best example of what can be done with painless personalization (painlesspersonalization.com might be a worthwhile domain name to buy).