Google’s New Frontier: Print Ads from BusinessWeek.com

Last November Google, the renowned profiteer of Internet keyword-based ad search, launched a new advertising initiative for printed ads. In this test project, Google would allow advertisers to bid on ad space from many of the top newspapers in the country, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Although the program is very similar to Google’s keyword-based ad search, it differs in that it allows the newspapers to set minimum prices and Google itself does not actually purchase any space; rather, it just provides the tools for advertisers to directly communicate with the newspaper. Many advertisers, such as eHealth, values this program in its ability to provide ROI (return on investment) metrics, which means advertisers can track how much profit is gained or lost on the amount of money intially invested into the advertisement (an extension of Google AdWords technology, which allowed advertisers to see exactly how many clicks a particular ad is receiving). The enormousness of Google’s advertiser network is hugely appealing to newspapers although some clients on both sides worry that Google will eventually consume and dominate the print-advertisement business and leave very little of the bidding to newspapers and advertisers.

Consequently, it seems that one of the key features of Google advertisement sales is its ability to return large amounts of information back to the advertisers about their investments in different advertisements. This is vastly important in the long run, as both the NYT and the Seattle Times have announced (as of March 12) huge revenue gains in advertisement space ever since the launching of the Print Ads program test. This could become a huge resource for Google to tap into, since newspaper advertisement generally still produces almost twice as much revenue as online ads. However, I feel like one of the main features of online keyword-based advertisement is missing, and that is the fact that it is keyword-based. Because online ads are geared specifically, using Google’s search algorithms, towards consumers that have blatantly expressed interest in that direction, there is a much higher chance that an ad returned based on a query will be relevant to the customer’s needs. Print ads could not possibly aimed as specifically as online ads and arguably would not produce as high rate of return as online ads. However, I imagine Google’s expansion into smaller and more specialized journals and magazines would potentially offset the disadvantage of generality.

See also Can Google Go Glossy? by BusinessWeek.com written at the end of 2005 after some of Google’s earlier attempts at print-based ads.