Goodbye Print Ads for AdWords
Posted at 5:10pm EST on 01/20/2009
Earlier this morning, Spencer Spinnell posted the announcement that the Google Print Ads team is, well, essentially being shutdown. Google Print Ads is being shutdown because it’s just not a sustainable business model as Google had hoped.
Just as it is with every other Google product, there’s never a sureness whether or not a product will take off. AdSense is a good example of this. It could have taken off [like it did], or it could have busted and been thrown out the window.
As we saw in November 2006, Google was only experimenting with ad sales through newspapers. It was not a definite product that was going to stick around for the long haul, but it was only an experiment. As with any kind of experiment, there is a point where you need to step back and see if it’s actually working or not, then re-evaluate whether you are going to continue the experiment or not.
For this experiment, Google has decided to close up shop and call it quits — to focus that energy on other new and existing products.
This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Fewer and fewer people are actually buying newspapers today. I, for one, haven’t .. wait, I haven’t ever bought a newspaper subscription. Wow. I just realize that.
Today’s generations are becoming more and more adept to reading the news online or on mobile devices, which means fewer and fewer papers being purchased.
