Primedia Continues to Rationalize, Sells Sprinks Ad Service to Google
At the SIIA's Brown Bag lunch panel this week, Sprinks General Manager Lance Podell characterized the service's capabilities as being somewhat the "anti-Ad Sense" approach to contextual advertising with its more topic-oriented approach to ad placement. No doubt with the announced purchase of Sprinks by Google noted by Reuters and other sources, future wording of these differences will be noted as being "complementary". Sprinks avoids a lot of the inherent pitfalls of trying to come up with effective contextual matches on a page level when placing ads in sites by sticking to a topic-based placement, and this seems to be an effective approach for advertisers who are trying to capture broader audiences efficiently. All the stranger, then, that Primedia would dump this property to raise cash for shoring up some yet-to-be-defined core of stable print publications. Primedia's loss is certainly Google's gain as it becomes an increasingly powerful force in the online ad world, but one wonders what Primedia will do to grow its business in the long run without securing key elements of online profitability. Print as a medium will exist indefinitely, but for those companies that cannot adapt an effective and profitable online identity to complement and bolster the print medium, print as a business will continue to look bleak, no matter how many babies are thrown to the wolves.