Google Inside

John Ellis brings up the rumor (or potential rumor) of Google acquiring The New York Times.

What’s in it for Google? Well, for one thing, it’s cheap. Sell off the New England properties and the real cost is $3 billion. That’s not much money to buy one of the premier brands of the information age. It also comes with some excellent real estate, which further reduces the risk. And happily enough, it will probably get cheaper in the coming months. So the price is definitely right.

This would fall in line with Google’s mission statement dead-on though, so that’s the first point to look at.

Right now, there is no substantial backing of this rumor or thought (and it’s definitely not a truemor!), but it is something that is speculatively interesting to think about.

If Google acquired one of the most respected news authorities in the world, what kind of advantage would that give Google? It would be just another asset for Google to serve ads on, for starters. Under a year ago, Google closed an advertising deal with Friendster to serve ads, with the same thing happening with MySpace.

The really fun part of all this is that Google could move the AdWords platform to start serving running ads through the NYTimes physical publication. Google is already doing something similar with EchoStar and their television network.

The last mention of Google testing out newspaper ads through AdWords was seen over a year ago here on Google Inside. Could this be the next big push for the newspaper ads running through AdWords for Google?

If it is, Google will be able to expand their newspaper ads through a whole new network. Bearing in mind that if it 1) does acquire The New York Times 2) then is successful with running newspaper ads through AdWords 3) could then be a starting point for a lot of other newspapers around the world to jump on board.

[Hat tip to Ashkan]