Reveries Magazine
THU SEP 1 05
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Google's Magazines. "It's almost like Coca-Cola calling and saying they want to put you on the back of the bottle," says Nicholas Longo of CoffeeCup Software, explaining why he's now buying magazine ads from Google, reports Saul Hansell in The New York Times. Yes, magazine ads -- from Google ... print ads. The deal is, Google is "buying ad space in magazines and filling it with a half dozen ads from clients of its vast online system." The magazines include PC Magazine and Maximum PC, and the pages are "identified as having been placed by Google."

For the advertisers, it's not only a chance to bask in Google's reflected glory, but also to do so at a bargain price. Exactly how much Google charges its advertisers isn't known, but presumably it is something less than the $72,497 per page PC Magazine lists on its official rate card. For the publisher, it's a chance "to sell ads to smaller businesses than it could reach before." Comments Jason Young of Ziff-Davis: "We're thrilled for PC Magazine in print to be presented to Google's fantastic base of hundreds of thousands of smaller advertisers." Other publishers, such as Richard Beckman, president of Conde Nast media group, don't share the enthusiasm, and would prefer not to have his ad pages brokered.

"If you start selling an advertisement at a price that is not healthy for your profit margins, you can never really recover," he says. Exactly where Google is headed with this idea (which is only a test) isn't entirely clear. However, some suspect the concept might evolve into print-ad auctions, much like Google's famous online-ad auctions. "The real power of Google lies in its yield-managed auction," says Kevin Lee of did-it.com, a search marketing firm. "It can be a very efficient way for a publisher to sell space." He adds that it might not be so efficient for the advertisers, who "might have to compete for something that wasn't competitive before."

Tim Manners, editor














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