It’s not terribly surprising to me that Google has given up on its two-year-old program to funnel print ads to newspapers. As a newspaper publisher, I provided pre-alpha feedback to Google on this program in 2006, and was involved in it from its earliest rollout until I left the business last spring.
No paper that I know of saw anything more than a trickle of advertising through this channel. Google won’t say how much business Print Ads did. But Google probably anticipated plenty of volume, so it built in only a small commission for itself. My guestimation is that their cut came to $1 million or less — probably not enough to cover costs, and certainly a figure with not enough zeros to keep it going as part of Google. I would not read this as Google giving up on newspapers — in better times, they killed programs with similarly minimal revenue, such as Google Answers.
Among the program’s flaws was the bidding system incorporated in it. Not only did this require a potential managerial decision for each individual ad, but it involved some back-and-forth dickering for every ad. Most of the very few offers that came through this channel were extremely low-ball ad proposals from sometimes questionable advertisers.
Meanwhile, Google has introduced Google Ad Planner, still in beta rollout, a tool for creating online advertising plans that incorporates the ability to find and select sites based on demographics — a feature that was entirely absent from Print Ads.
