Why Google Print Will Be Ineffective as An Advertising Medium Until There’s A Google Print API

November 10, 2005 by wfzimmerman | No comments

All the energetic discussion about the legal and moral pros and cons of Google Print misses the point why Google Print is ineffective as a revenue-generating medium for publishers.

The fundamental reason is that Google Print is a fire-and-forget system, unlike Google Adsense, which allows extensive tweaking and testing to improve ad revenues.

With Google Print, publishers must dump their content into the system and wait, sometimes endlessly, for Google Print to load the content. I have six titles; two of them have been loaded since February, the others are still waiting.

Google Print provides the publisher with two possible revenue streams: Buy This Book click-throughs to the publisher website, and advertising clickthroughs. Your BTB and Ad CTRs are what they are, and there is nothing you can do to change them, because Google controls the layout of the Google Print pages.

(Terminology note: Google Print does not refer to its Ad service as AdSense, because it’s not AdSense. It’s dumbed-down! It’s also telling that they do not calculate eCPM, even though it is a $ per impressions business.)

The only thing you can do to improve BTB revenue is to improve the effectiveness of your target page. And there is nothing you can do to improve Ad CTR–the ads’ position on the page is controlled by Google. So your ad revenue it is strictly a function of Google Print’s total search volume and the current demand for keywords related to your content.

After the Nov. 3 publicity events around Google Print, my total impressions per day increased by a factor of 2.5. My BTB CTR and Ad CTR stayed the same, and keyword demand didn’t change much, so my revenue increased by a factor of 2.5. Yay!

Based on this model, I can estimate how much Ad revenue my other books will bring in by looking at the Google search volumes using the AdSense keyword tool. Of course, search behavior on Google Print will be somewhat different than on regular Google, but I’m guessing it won’t be that much different. Based on this keyword analysis, I estimate that the other four books that aren’t live yet will together generate about 60% of the revenue as the two that are already live. So having Google make those books live will be nice, but it’s not going to dramatically change my business picture with Google Print.

The problem is, there’s nothing I can do to “reinforce success” — all I can do is sit and watch the system operate under Google’s direction. The good news is that Google Print’s total search volume should rise relentlessly over the years. As total Print search volume rises, my revenue should increase in direct proportion. The bad news is that the demand for “my” keywords will gradually decline over time and new books will be added to Google Print that will compete for the keyword traffic.

So I am looking at a fairly predictable revenue stream — my guess is that Google Print revenue will increase by, say, a factor of 5x over 5 years, while my books will gradually lose keyword market share by perhaps the same factors over time. Bottom line: I may never make a whole lot of money from Google Print, and the process is almost entirely out of my control. Not an appealing place to invest my energies.

What’s needed, I think, is a Google Print API that allows publishers and, perhaps, third parties, to display Google Print results within hosted websites that can be tinkered with. Unfortunately, as long as Google is struggling to get Google Print accepted, they’re not going to stick their finger any further into the electric socket of publisher paranoia by offering an API.

Update: this points out that there is still plenty of room for Microsoft to execute better in the Ray Ozzie advertising space.

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