When advertising-centric companies like Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) start assessing business models in this recession, one thing remains clear: innovate or shrink. Standard advertising channels are all suffering as consumers close their wallets and purses amid massive layoffs and plummeting savings, and Google is not immune to this.Even though the company has a massive cash stockpile, investors still want to see if Google can innovate more in this economy and survive (and even thrive) through a protracted advertising slump? What to do? Why, get ads into questionable places that could tarnish Google's reputation in exchange for more clicks and more revenue. Say, for example, some parked domain that has no purpose but to serve up ads by Google? Yes, Google is willing to entertain that as acceptable.
Google Finance and Google Image Search have also seen the addition of ads recently as Google expands beyond text ads near web searches and integrates this type of advertising among its many properties. Why it didn't do this years ago is a mystery. For quite a while, its search ad business was subsidizing everything else the company made (and provided for free in most cases). Not anymore. Google does stand a good chance that pieces of this strategy may backfire, though. It may be trying to expand too much too fast for the customer it is trying to reach to be of any worth.
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