Google Considers Online Ads to Appeal More Than Print Ads by 2012

May 14, 2010

Los Angeles, California – May 14, 2010 – When you gaze through the pleasant PowerPoint presentation organized at Google on the newspaper industry, a few things stand out.

If editorial costs are a measly 14% of revenue, then the hugest mistake of the last 5 years has been the atrocious meaningless out of editorial staff, which results in less content to sell and, ultimately, in less good content to sell against. The portion is progressively more indistinct as it goes, with a distressing lack of examples, but that's Google for you—their method is that they build stuff and see what works and what sticks, and that model totally works in the long term.

But one thing that is obvious is that everybody at Google seems to consider in enormous growth in the position, incidence and even cost of demonstrate advertising online.

And then there's this astonishing sentence that gives impetus to online business: Sooner or later—maybe in two years, certainly in 10—display ads will, per eyeball, be worth more online than they were in print.

The massive void between the cost of print ads per eyeball and the value per user of ads online is frequently viewed these days as something irresolvable; and so it follows that websites that are attached to newspapers believe they just can't support themselves even on colossal traffic. Google believes otherwise is striking.