For the 2nd time in less than a week Google has added a small text link under the search box. The last advertisement was for the new droid phone. Today Google is promoting free WiFi over the holidays at 47 airports and on Virgin America flights. Now I just booked a flight yesterday to Chicago for SES (Search Engine Strategies Conference) in December and if I would of known about on flight WiFi I would of paid extra to go with Virgin! Hopefully all airlines will adapt to the new technology being used called Gogo Inflight. I wonder if Gogo is related to Google. I think it is safe to assume that Google owns this company or will acquire it soon. Oh but there’s a catch on Virgin. For a limited time it’s free! From today until January 15, 2010. Just like the drug dealer giving you a little taste to get you hooked. Google and Virgin want to give you a little taste of surfing the net at 35,000 feet. I’d definately pay an extra $20 or so to surf the net on longer flights. I don’t think I’d pay much more than this though. We shall see!
So I assume some others will post on this subject matter later today. I’ll post some recaps later. I don’t personally mind the short little text ads that Google’s placing on the home page. It is a form of advertising and I wonder what type of deal Virgin and Google worked out to get this in place. I didn’t see any direct links to Virgin from the pages explaining the deal so they might of done this intentionally since there was some uproar in the community about the link over to Verizon on the droid announcement. My only concern about this is that Google would start opening this up to others and start cluttering up the home page. People have come to appreciate the clutter free search page! Lets keep it this way Google!!
WEB + MARKETING 