Google Ends Print Advertising Experiment

(MoneyWatch) 

During the midst of yesterday Inauguration celebration, many of us could be forgiven if we temporarily overlooked the announcement by Google that it is ending its two-year-old program to help the newspaper industry sell print advertising.

The effort will wind down as of February 28, and will effectively end Google's partnership with around 800 newspapers.

We've heard relatively little about this program since its launch in November 2006, but it always seemed predicated on a questionable premise. Selling print ads is a labor-intense business, with creative and sales team that spend a lot of sweat equity securing accounts and keeping clients happy.

Google's online expertise, however, depends on disinter-mediating almost all of these people, auctioning keywords off to the highest bidder, and establishing a massive virtual market of publishers and advertisers who may never meet in the real world.

In many online media companies, only one or two employees may be involved on the part-time work of managing the SEM process at Google. The search giant does offer an army of "optimizers," who are available to try and help advertisers and publishers achieve their best potential results, but professional sales and creative ad teams are simply not part of Google's world view, any more than journalists or editors have proved to be.

The bottom line of yesterday's announcement is that newspapers will now have one fewer option to try and save their faltering industry during what is an ever-deepening recession. If it helps any of the print guys feel better, Google is feeling some of the pain too, and has made a number of recent program cuts and layoffs numbering around 100 workers to date.

Note: Thanks to the ever-vigilant Brent Harrison for pointing me to the Google announcement.