Google paper

By Ryan Bowman
November 7th, 2006 at 02:03pm
Media

Everyone’s talking about it but its not that surprising, or at least it shouldn’t be: Google is stepping into the newspaper arena.  They are vying hard to become the long-tail vacuum of old media, sucking up all the ad space that newspapers dont sell on their own, selling it for slightly cheaper and keeping a cut (probably about 20% but no one really knows and they won’t get a thing in the initial three month trial that was announced yesterday).  That Google has extended their ‘media buyer’ role into traditional media is less than shocking, first of all because they have tried (and failed) before only with magazines; second of all its a pretty logical extension of the web advertising business that is the core cash cow of the Google business as a whole.  They will of course try to extend the web metric system, with all its fancy the built in feedback loops, into the newspaper advertising business. Everyone is already braying about the web showing newspapers yet again how to innovate and its a hard thing to refute, in what world are all those huge newspaper businesses in the States not to pick up on this opportunity?  Its embarassing.

Entry Filed under: Media