Google Print (Newspaper) Ads (Launching -- Discussion) | Hacker News Reader

Google Print (Newspaper) Ads (Launching -- Discussion)

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Has anyone heard about the Google newspaper ads? I received an email to my adwords account email today offering $1000 free credit to beta test this service.

Do you think this will be successful? I wonder why they're starting to target newspapers instead of staying online. Newspaper readers are dropping in replacement of them reading the news online so i wonder why would they do this and if it'll be successful?

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Google ads will work on the newspaper medium. Traditional newspaper ads are distruptive marketing: the content of the ads is not similar to the content. Google will have content sensitive newspaper ads, which will work a lot better.

so i'm assuming that papers like the wallstreet journal will have ads based on investing? did i understand you correctly w/ that?

That's not true at all. Look at the WSJ versus your local paper. In the WSJ they advertise Bentleys. In your local paper they advertise the local sporting goods store.

Ads don't need to be relevant to content. That's the ultimate mistake with adwords. Ads need to be relevant to readers. WSJ readers are, with high probability, richer than the readers of other papers. So they want bentleys, no matter what they are reading about.

http://advertising.wsj.com/audience/index.html

Print subscribers' average net worth: 2.4M.

Good heavens. Maybe this is why they don't seem to care that their subscriber-only articles are invisible to the rest of the world. I thought they were just backward, but maybe the WSJ is in effect a luxury product.

Come to think of it, though, those numbers could as easily imply that their average reader is very old. So maybe they are backward.

An NPR story I heard the other day brought up a related factor in their stubbornness to go free: unlike most other newspaper subscriptions, most WSJ subscriptions either get paid for by an employer or are written off.

Note that they use "average" instead of median.

I'm sure more super-rich people read it than super-poor people, so this average is a bit aliased.

Good point. If Bill Gates subscribes, he alone adds about $33k to the average net worth of their 1.7 million print subscribers.

I very much doubt a census was taken. The page says the source is from a "2007 WSJ Subscriber Study." It is very doubtful Bill Gates was part of this study. In all likelihood, they polled a relatively small random sample and the median was pretty close to the average.

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