Google: Too Many Ads, Too Little Real Estate

Google has run out of room for its advertisements. Despite the Internet having over 100 million websites, I guess the real estate is too precious (and not everyone has opted to have ads appear on their websites), causing the search engine giant to look towards other means of getting their money in advertisements: printed media.

But hold on a second — I don’t actually read the paper! And if these advertisers really wanted to publish their ads in the newspaper, newspapers did come first, after all, so wouldn’t they have thought of this method of advertising already?

Unfortunately, I think that advertising on print media will miss a huge demographic of individuals just like me who prefer to read about newsworthy items online. I know that while statistics show that newspapers are still preferred to online media, this figure is likely to continue changing as everything becomes seemingly more “centralized.” I know that I’m doing a lot more things online — such as buying groceries and drug items, and if my neighbors asking me about drugstore.com is any indication that they’re considering trying it out, I’m sure the transition will continue going towards the ease and convenience of doing things online.

While I don’t see that happening overnight, there’s a strong indication that as my generation continues being heavily dependent on online technology, this system may be successful in the first run — or even a little beyond — but will ultimately fail as the Internet takes a stronghold and becomes more well known for replacing print media. I may be a minority for now, but only time will tell, and it’s likely not to favor traditional means of communication.

We had telegrams long ago. Telegrams were replaced by e-mail. I don’t see a shortage of print news anytime soon, but I do think that Google will need to look forward to having online real estate on which to populate its ads, because this won’t be a good long-term solution for the company (or for its advertisers).