Google: $48 billion newspaper friend or foe?

The global newspaper industry will converge in Zurich, Switzerland next month for “The 17th World Newspaper Advertising Conference” and Google will be on the agenda:

The reverse sell: digital to print ads

Now search engines want to sell newspaper ads! Is this an opportunity or a grave threat? A report from the USA on the evolving role of search engines in traditional print revenues.

Will Google be selling newspaper print ads in your market?

Google wants to sell newspaper ads, as it wants to sell every kind of ad in every type of medium in every country in the world.

Should the $48 billion U.S. newspaper advertising industry embrace Google, or fear it?

Google is not shy about its desire to dominate the world’s advertising. It nevertheless declares it is a “friend” to would be competitors. 

Tom Phillips, Google Director of Print Ads:

I think we'll have real impact next year on newspapers' bottom lines. We open the medium to a whole new class of advertisers.

Google claims it can apply its golden AdWords formula anywhere and everywhere, but it has not shown offline success, to date.

In “Google NOT revolutionizing newspaper ad sales” and “Google $48 billion Print Ads test: fourth time’s the charm?” I dissect Google’s motivations, value proposition to newspapers and unconvincing results of its fourth attempt at brokering print advertising.

Savvy newspapers are determined to keep their proprietary high-quality advertising accounts far from Google’s grasp. While Google promises to help newspapers sell-out their lower quality inventory to smaller advertisers, it has not yet mastered the SME market for its own (AdWords) account.

Google’s “targeted, measurable advertising” claim remains unproven offline. An AdWords participant in Google’s newspaper “test,” Jeremy Mayes, reports underwhelming results:

Overall the newspaper test delivered a small set of visitors who had metrics that were below average when compared to PPC traffic.
This was free test so it was more about peaking in at the potential than making a dollar. I will say that based on the results form the test the newspaper ads would have to be pretty inexpensive for this model to work in certain markets, and, tracking results at the level in which PPC managers are accustomed too isn't there.