Google Gets Ink On Your Pixels

Google seems to be interested in everything even tangentially associated with their main business, which is selling web ads to display while they find stuff you're looking for. They've been granted an interesting patent recently, one that shows just how far down the road they think about things: Google Magazine.

Consumers may purchase a variety of publications in various forms, e.g., print form (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), electronic form (e.g., electronic newspapers, electronic books (”e-Books”), electronic magazines, etc.), etc. The publishers define the content of such publications, and advertisers define which advertisements (ads) may be seen in the publications. Since consumers have no control over publication content or advertisements, they may purchase a publication that contains at least some content and advertisements that may be of no interest to them.

Publishers often lack insight into the profiles of consumers who purchase their publications, and, accordingly, miss out on subscription and advertisement revenue due to a lack of personalized content and advertisements. Likewise, consumer targeting for advertisers is limited, and there is virtually no standardization for ad sizes (e.g., an ad that is supposed to be a full page may need to be reduced in size to fit within a publication). Accordingly, advertisers sometimes purchase sub-optimal or worthless ad space in an attempt to reach their target markets. Advertisers also have difficulty identifying new prospective market segments to target because they have limited insight into the desires and reactions of consumers.

So Google's idea is that perhaps you could walk up to a kiosk, pick out a bunch of content, and it's printed out for you to read later -- along with advertising that's narrowly tailored to the content you chose; or take it to go in downloaded form from anywhere. Good luck to magazines that try to personalize content and advertisements without giving Google a cut from here on in.

Tags:  Google, ink, googl, pixel, Pi, GOOG, K