Google Already Moving into the Printed Ads Market

Google Print Ads is trying to get the online clients to buy offline advertising space in newspapers, according to the "Sunday Times" newspaper. This is following the footsteps of the same service being available in the United States where it is said to have somewhere around 600 titles.

Not too shabby, The DoubleClick deal that would guarantee Google's supremacy with online advertising hasn't gone through everywhere (there's still Europe left) and the Mountain View based company has already been reaching out to another market, that of advertising in print. They've already done this for their own services, off the top of my head would be the recent India Small Services that had a Google Maps print pinpointing them.

I must confess that I would really like to see an "Ads by Google" section in the magazines that I read, but I'm quite sure that if they keep the layout, they won't be drawing too many clients. They need to spice things up a little bit and give up the classic Google white for some color to draw the buyer's eye to it. The way the system works is the same as with AdWords, a share of the revenue from each ad would go Google's way, but in order to help its clients a little more, they offer to design the ads (*ahem, color, please!*).

A staff writer for CBR notes that Google has chosen the United Kingdom for this expansion of its program because "the search engine reportedly has 75% of market share for search advertising in the UK, which is one of the four countries where Internet advertising comprises more than 15% of total media expenditure. Google's UK advertising revenues rose by 40% to approximately 1.25bn pounds ($2.5bn) in 2007."

Phil Stokes, the leader of the entertainment and media practice at Price Waterhouse Coopers, said that "We can foresee newspaper groups participating in online exchanges for print advertising in the near future, but consider it unlikely that the larger players will automatically gravitate towards a large specialist third-party online provider without looking for other solutions first." That sounds about right.