Google's Not Out of Print ... Yet

Just when you thought print and Google had parted ways, Google has started to give out advice to the magazine industry ... on how to improve its Web sites. Yeah, the timing is a bit odd since Google officially shuttered its Print Ads product, targeted towards newspapers, at the end of last month. But yesterday Google put its analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik in front of the crowd at a Magazine Publishers of America conference focused on digital. (Note: he explains his job as "Data driven decision making uncomplexified".)

And that's just the beginning. On May 14, it's officially Google Day for MPA members, who can go to Google's New York offices (free to the first 200 MPA members!) and listen to "Google team leaders ... discuss strategies for magazine publishers to improve websites and build audiences." There are few details about it on the MPA website, but one can assume that Kaushik will be very much in attendance.

So what is Google's, and Kaushik's advice? To treat magazine websites less like conduits for selling print subscriptions and more as a place where content -- and consumers consumption of it -- is king. According to Advertising Age, Mr. Kaushik advised, "Advertisers and subscriptions are not going to save your business. Customers will." (Except that ultimately, those customer will help determine ad rates, but let's not get too complexified.)

Even though he didn't quite say so, it sounded as though Kaushik's advice was a refined version of paying close attention to those "most read," "most emailed" and "most blogged" lists that every publishing site seems to have, and producing content accordingly. In his view, those kinds of metrics are telling publishers something -- to serve up more of it.

He also advocated that magazines pay attention to how many people routinely leave a site without clicking on anything and how often returning visitors come back. All of this is, well, logical -- so logical that the shocking part of this post isn't that Google still wants to lend a hand to print, but that these metrics aren't already commonplace.