Paul 01 Sep 05

My immediate thought was, Gruber was right - they are an ad company. Interesting move.

Wesley Walser 01 Sep 05

I can’t see this being nearly as affective as advertising online. The purpose was target audiance, and you significantly loose that in print.

It makes sense for a large company who needs brand recignition, but for small town companies it just doesn’t make sense.

Either way Google will do it slightly differant and do it well. It should be interesting.

Dave Giunta 01 Sep 05

Wesley: You’re right… the purpose of online advertising is to find a very specific target audience (as is all advertising, I might add)… but you don’t significantly lose that in print as you suggest. It’s almost exactly the same, in fact.

Consider the fact that you (usually) have to pay for magazines… this simple fact makes magazine subscriptions a simple opt-in device. Those that pay for a magazine are MORE likely to be hardcore into the topic that the magazine focuses on than on the web not less.

While, of course, loyalties to websites are happening, a site’s audience is usually a mix of mildy interested users and super passionate users. Which means, your advertising message that’s targeted to the content on the page (as Google’s AdSense provides), is only relavent to some subset of the site’s audience (the super passionate users and a portion—not all—of the mildly interested users).

But I can only see this working in magazines where this opt-in device is apparent. Adding Google’s AdSense concept to daily newspapers or classified ad sections would be crazy. Those sections aren’t about targeted communication.

My .02

cheez 01 Sep 05

Well-done. Google leverages its strength in arbitraging an inefficient and fragmented market, opens a new revenue stream for itself, makes an existing revenue stream more efficient for publishers, and provides a new channel to its advertisers.

PROFIT!

Ted Fickes 01 Sep 05

Well, duh, it seems like an obvious thing for them to do now that I think about it. Don’t know as much about print news advertising as I do about the web but the digitizing of the news media is happening at the print level. Newspaper advertising can and is being pretty well targeted - at least to the community level. The Denver papers here (there are two but they operate jointly) have started community-targeted inserts and online ‘hubs.’ Think the same is happening with the Chicago Tribune and suburban papers there and here. Elsewhere too, I’m sure.

I don’t see why advertising and printing segmentation couldn’t be narrowed to the carrier route level and eventually to the household.

And ‘print’ media outlets are desperately working on their online advertising/websites to compete with free ads at Craisglist, among others, that are a threat to newspaper classified ads.

May not succeed but seems a fertile possibility.

Aaron Blohowiak 01 Sep 05

But how are you supposed to track click-throughs?

Farhan Lalji 02 Sep 05

So do the print media which will be placing these ads have any say in who Google is allowed to sell the adspace to? If not couldn’t that be a little dicey?

I mean smaller companies which have g-ad’s in print publications which have larger full ads by other larger companies in the same publications and may be in competition with eachother. For example how would Dell feel about a g-ad in PC mag for some small PC seller on a page before it knowing the smaller firm paid a fraction of the price for its ad and is probably having great effect if simply for the novelty of the type of ad.

It’s a great idea, will be interesting to see how it plays out.

cheez 02 Sep 05

clickthru tracking in a print environmt can be done by posting a phone # to call for more info or purchase.

next!

cheez 02 Sep 05

or an URL that points to a discount.

Marry 03 Sep 05

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