Google to trial print version of Adwords in US

Classifieds next stop for advertising revenues

5 November 2006 19:28 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Google is expected to announce a new advertising partnership with over 50 American newspapers on Monday that will see its advertising service overflow into newspapers.

According to early reports on the web of the expected announcement, Google is so successful with its Adwords offering that it is unable to fulfil advertisers demand for the service online

In the test program, which will run until February, Google will offer some of its Adwords customers a chance to advertise in newspapers in a similar way to how they currently advertise on the web.

The program, which Google is expected to formally announce Monday, will mark Google's first foray into the sale and placement of display advertising in newspapers and sees the company make a shift from its online focus to a more traditional advertising medium.

"This is money that our advertisers would spend with us if we had the online inventory for them to spend it on", said Tom Phillips, Google's director of print advertising.

Publications including the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and the Washington Post were among more than a dozen that participated this fall in a small-scale test. However the service is expected to come to the UK in the near future.

According to sources on the web, the test, which is still in Alpha phase, will involve the sale of small advertisements that might take up as much as a quarter of a page of classified ads.

The system will work similarly to Google's Ad Sense that sells advertising space on thousands of Web sites via an online auction system. Small businesses then pay for these ads with a credit card and can set budgets to limit the amount of money - normally in the tens of dollars rather than the tens of thousands.

Earlier this month research showed that Google is making more money from advertising in the UK than Channel 4, which has led the TV station’s CEO to warn that the TV industry has underestimated the pull of the Internet.

The Internet Advertising Bureau has said that online ad spending in the UK had jumped 40% in the first half of 2006 compared with the same time period the previous year.