The Associated Press reported this morning that Google is expanding a pilot program representing the company's second attempt to crack the realm of traditional print advertising.

Two months after launching a trial run with 100 selected advertisers and 66 newspapers, the online ad firm will soon be rolling out the next stage of its print publishing campaign in earnest, enabling online advertisers to purchase surplus print ad inventory.

Last November, Google auctioned off ad inventory from about two dozen magazines, to existing customers of its AdWords program. As BusinessWeek reported following the end of that experiment, customers paid as low as $4,000 for half-page, full-color national print ads that would normally sell for over $59,000 apiece. Even then, however, testers found their ads returned as little as 6% of their cost in sales. Kind of makes you wonder how much they would have lost had they paid full price.

Google's second experiment focused on newspapers, and while more limited in its initial scope, appears far more successful, with ad sales reportedly tripling the company's expectations.

Full article: BetaNews