Newspaper ad revs: not even Google can save them
Jinfo Blog

21st January 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Tameka Kee at PaidContent.com (http://www.paidcontent.org) wrote on January 20th about Google’s decision to end its experiment with its PrintAds product (http://digbig.com/4ydhm). The product, which launched in November 2006 with 50 newspapers signed up, enabled advertisers to bid, auction-style, for placement in papers, and eventually, according to Google’s Director of Print Ads Spencer Spinnell, more than 800 papers signed up. But even that broad participation was not enough to entice advertisers to stay. According to Spinnell’s blog post announcing the demise of PrintAds(http://digbig.com/4ydhk), “It is clear that the current Print Ads product is not the right solution, so we are freeing up those resources to try to come up with new and innovative online solutions that will have a meaningful impact for users, advertisers and publishers.” Read: Google is taking a hard look at its bottom line and cutting the products that aren’t pulling their weight to make sure it emerges unscathed from the economic crisis. The reminder may be that Google technology can’t solve every problem. The problem PrintAds sought to address – that is, providing a new pricing model for a consortium of newspapers – isn’t the real issue. In fact, Yahoo’s newspaper consortium is promising incremental revenues to some of its participants, like AH Belo. (http://digbig.com/4ydhn) The bigger problem that remains to be solved, and which may not be cleared up in time, is why advertisers would continue to use print publications when the audience is shifting online to a free competitor product, oftentimes provided by the papers themselves – the free newspaper web site. With the economic pressure on consumers to shed unnecessary costs (like newspapers subscriptions), that shift will likely accelerate in months to come. Even the most efficient pricing model in the world isn’t going to convince advertisers to stick with print. So what? you may ask. If advertisers simply switch to online ads instead of print, at least the money stays with the papers. The problem is that online advertisements generally cost about a tenth of the cost of a print ad – here’s an interesting post on blog Publishing 2.0 showing how the math works for the New York Times (http://digbig.com/4ydnh.) It’s do or die time for newspapers; if they’ve been holding back with a better rev model, this would be the time to let ‘er rip.

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