Why Google Radio Ads Failed

Radio Tunes Out Google in Rare Miss for Web Titan from the Wall Street Journal has some excellent history on why Google Radio ultimately failed earlier this year.

I’ll quote the story early on, but the Wall Street Journal piece is excellent, on its own.

A look at what went wrong shows that Google misjudged the capacity of its technology to work beyond the Web, and underestimated the human side of the business. Radio stations refused to turn over airtime to a computer algorithm that set prices far lower than their own rates. Big advertisers steered clear.

The key issues outlined in the article:

• Hard to track radio ads
• Clients were too small
• Publishers were less willing to change
• Stations were “frustrated” with Google’s way

Further coverage on this topic can be found at Techmeme.