Google’s Newspaper Ad Sales Venture

May be able to deliver a lot of potential eyeballs for very low costs.

Some pretty impressive newspapers are participating in this auction bid system for space including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

Procedure is to make an offer for desired space specifying size of ad, position desired, date of insertion, bid price, etc. If a paper accepts the offer the ad runs, if not not.

Observations:

• For many marketers the uncertainty of the ad running is a deal breaker.
• However, for direct response purveyors this represents a heck of an opportunity to ‘game’ newspapers for very low insertion costs.

Recommendation: Regular newspaper advertisers who are permitted* to use the Google print system can easily test this program to determine the lowest possible rates for each newspaper on their schedule and then use this information to negotiate lower costs directly to ensure that ads run as desired.

*Note: It is my understanding that some very large traditional newspaper advertisers such as retail department stores are not permitted to use this system. One wonders how this works and who is on this list.