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Google to sell newspaper advertising

Google, which has been criticised by newspapers for exploiting their content on Google News, wants to partner with newspapers to sell print advertising.

As Saul Hansell reports on nytimes.com, Google will test the scheme for three months with 50 major papers and 100 advertisers in the United States.

Using the same technology that drives its AdWords online advertising programme, Google will offer newspapers the chance to sell unbooked advertising spaces that would otherwise be filled with the publisher’s own “house ads”.

For Google, the test is an important step to the company’s audacious long-term goal: to build a single computer system through which advertisers can promote their products in any medium. For the newspaper industry, reeling from the loss of both readers and advertisers, this new system offers a curious bargain: the publishers can get much-needed revenue but in doing so they may well make Google — which is already the biggest seller of online advertising — even stronger.

Google already sells advertising on radio stations and with its recent purchase of YouTube is well positioned to sell online video or even broadcast television commercials. It has also ventured into magazine advertising but with limited success, concluding that more its model works better with higher frequency publications – like daily newspapers.

Some papers in the test programme will restrict Google ads to smaller spaces to avoid alienating their existing major customers, but others are prepared to try the service for large ads too.

“We have tens of thousands of advertisers we deal with face to face,” said Michael C. Lemke, the senior vice president for sales and marketing of the Seattle Times, which is participating in the test. “They [Google] are talking about an exponentially larger base that can do business on a self-serve basis. These are clients that metropolitan newspapers have a hard time getting to.”

And what’s this mean for advertisers?

“I’m hopeful the program will lower advertising costs in the print world,” said Bruce Telkamp, a senior vice president of eHealth, an online insurance agency. “By aggregating a large number of advertisers, Google should get purchasing power.”