Google moves into related content for AdSense publishers, a little late

Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2015 and reports on the launch of AdSense’s related-content widget, later known as Matched content; the events described were current then, and the product has changed since.

Google has just entered the content recommendation business with a new tool for blog publishers who work with AdSense. For now, Google’s version of related content only includes internal links within the site in question. In other words, it only shows related articles from the same blog, at least for the time being.

For now, the idea is for a blog’s visitors to discover other interesting articles by the same publisher, keeping the user on the blog for longer, something practically every blog already had. So if Google has decided to create this widget, we can infer that the idea is to expand its functionality later to include paid links to external sites, as companies such as Outbrain, Taboola and even Yahoo itself already do, including advertisers’ links through native ads.

For my taste, Google’s entry into this business is a little late, and in fact I didn’t understand why one of the companies with the biggest infrastructure hadn’t yet decided to create something like this. Had it been quicker, Outbrain and Taboola probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the growth they have been experiencing.

Google has probably realised that many publishers were already using both advertising systems at the same time and decided not to lose that slice of the pie in this business, in which Google is the leader today.

Adding this widget is really simple: you just have to implement a code snippet like any other AdSense ad.

See also: If Google went into the restaurant business, what would it look like?

Featured image: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.