Google gives up on newspaper advertising

Newspaper advertisement program cutting was announced by Google Inc on Tuesday as the deepening recession eats away at Google's business of selling ads on its own Web site and thousands of other Internet destinations. It was a 2-year-old attempt to extend its dominance of Internet marketing into another medium, set out by Google in November 2006 to help newspapers to connect with the Web's growing audience.

The program that allowed potential advertisers bid online to fill unsold space in the participating newspapers, leaving it up to publishers whether to accept the offers, was found by Google as non-effective. The decision touched about 800 U.S. newspapers that had initially enlisted Google's help. 

Google promises to help newspaper publishers find other ways to make more money and sell more Internet advertisement by driving more traffic to their Web sites. But Google may be hard pressed to address newspapers' biggest problem: Internet advertisement can not generate as much revenue as print one.

Yahoo Inc., occupying the second position, unlike Google, never concentrated on the print side. Nearly 800 papers are testing a new platform that the company believes will make it easier to reach specific advertisement in Web. 

Google's newspaper print advertisement giving up, according to the opinion of Lem Lloyd, a vice president of Yahoo's U.S. partnerships, doesn’t pretend to be a factor in Yahoo's relationship with the industry's publishers.