Huh? I thought I bought text links! Not Newspaper Classifieds

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but this is a clear example of how far Google's getting from it's roots. The entire purpose behind this is ad revenue, and it's got absolutely nothing to do with what they're good at - search. It's an effort to make money, using nothing but their brand name.

I predict (you can quote me on this) they will get their asses handed to them on a platter.

Never mind that I don't understand why anyone advertises in print media. I've had my ass handed to me a few times trying that out myself :). Far better off to spend some more time/money/effort into wringing more out of online advertising than moving into that dinosaur market of print.

Amazon is offering it's platform to other businesses to utilize for commerce. Google is extending it's market technology to offline media. The former gives Amazon access to amazing data on retail markets it is not yet in, and the latter gives Google amazing access to the offline media market it has helped to decimate (as well as what remains of the market CraigsList has stolen from print).

Aside from the obvious conclusions re: the strategic merits of these endeavors, I suggest that maintaining a state of the art technology platform these days is very very expensive compared to a few years ago (take a look at tech salaries for example). I would guess they want to stay on the edge of competitive R&D but can't afford to do it on a percentage of net profits...

Doesn't matter. If there is one thing I have learned from watching the big Goo, it's that they know how to integrate their available resources to maximize the efficiency of their services.

Granted, print media is declining. Rapidly. According to this article, by the New York Times, stock was down to 24 cents a share in April of this year, compared to 76 cents a share in the first quarter of 2005. That's a pretty big hit to take.

That notwithstanding, there are people who still buy newspapers, and even as a declining industry, Google can still reach the eyes of people they haven't as of yet. In fact, one might posit that they stand to reach a lot of people previously inaccessible through Internet media, as (believe it or not) not everyone has yet embraced the Information Age. After all, there are companies still relying on part of their yearly profits to come from Dial-Up Internet! And that stopped being cool in the 70s.

It seems to me that the term "Ad Overflow" is misleading, as if Google plans to take ads that didn't make it into their PPC rotation and pop them off onto newspapers. That doesn't make any sense. If there isn't room in a PPC rotation, an ad will just get displayed less times... there's no way to measure clicks with print media.

No, it appears more viable that Google intends to offer print media alternatives to larger advertisers with local clients who don't feel that their ads are getting enough visibility currently. And if more than 50 newspapers nationwide want to sell Google's ads, that signifies to me that there is a market to sell those ads into print through Google.

I guess what I am saying, is: even with print media dying, as long as there is a company willing to pay Google to get an ad into the last newspaper on earth, and the last newspaper is selling ad space, Google would be dumb NOT to take a percentage off the top for hooking up the advertiser with the newspaper.

That's all Google's EVER had to do to make all of its billions of dollars... provide the medium to connect eyeballs with ad walls, be it in digital or analog format.

...that newspaper ads aren't worth it.

I thought they tried this before and ended up with loads of space they hadn't sold?