Google offers display ads in Gmail

Google is offering brand owners the chance to get closer to Gmail users by opening up the body of the email to display ads, as part of a test of new Internet marketing services.
A spokesman for the company said that the ads are part of Google’s “experiment with image ads on messages with heavy image content”.
Gmail is part of the Google Display Network, which also includes properties such as YouTube, Google Finance, Blogger and “over one million web, video, gaming and mobile display partners”.
The move follows reports that Gmail it is likely to be hit hard by the launch of Facebook Messages, after a survey predicted that over half of the social networking site’s 600 million users will sign up for the service.
Meanwhile, the company has been blasted in the House of Commons, with one Labour MP claiming Google damages British business through anti-competitive tactics.
In a Westminster Hall debate, Graham Jones, Labour MP for Hyndburn, called on the Government to take action against the search giant.
“Google has gone from being a competitor to a predator and from a horizontal organic search client to a monopoly giant, with subliminal and unclear sponsored searches that favour other Google products,” he said.
“Without search neutrality rules to constrain Google’s competitive advantage, we may be heading toward a bleakly uniform world of Google everything.”
The preferential placement of Google’s price comparison service, for example, caused traffic to the UK’s leading price comparison services to fall by an average of 41 per cent over two years.
The MP went on to highlight several British companies that he claimed had been affected by Google’s market power, which given a near 90 per cent share of search could suck the traffic from competing services.
“There are suggestions that Google’s search results are influenced by advertising and even that Google’s technology might deliberately lower the visibility of rival sites,” said Jones.
“The preferential placement of Google’s price comparison service, for example, caused traffic to the UK’s leading price comparison services to fall by an average of 41% over two years. During the same period, internet traffic in general rose by 30%. That is a marked contrast, but more marked is the fact that traffic to Google’s price comparison site rose by 125% during the same period.”
According to the MP’s figures, the preferential placement of Google Maps decimated traffic to Multimap and Streetmap, the UK’s two leading online mapping services, while RightMove, a British real estate portal, lost 10 per cent of its market value on speculation that Google was planning a UK property search service.
In response, culture minister Ed Vaizey played down the issue saying he believed that the Internet should remain open to market forces, rather than regulation, and that there are 177 search engines servicing the UK market.