Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet search engine, said efforts to expand into print advertising are moving more slowly than the company expected.
“It’s still in the nascent stages,” Jonathan Rosenberg, who heads Google’s product management, said Wednesday in a conference call with analysts. “That probably hasn’t taken off as fast as we would have liked.”
Rosenberg’s comments disappointed Google investors unused to company stumbles. The Mountain View, Calif.- based company is trying to capture more revenue from its search-ad clients by getting into print, radio and television advertising. Chief executive Eric Schmidt said it will take multiple attempts to find a successful strategy for these new markets.
“People really shouldn’t have expected much more from this,” said Sasa Zorovic, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. who rates the shares “buy.”
Shares of Google fell 12 cents to $371.82 at Wednesday’s close. The shares, which have fallen 10 percent this year, dropped from around $376 after the company made the comments about the print effort.
Google in February expanded a print-ad test to 28 magazines.
“It will be multiple strategies and multiple attempts,” Schmidt said. “People forget that the model that is working so well for us today took several years to get right.”
Schmidt also said the company isn’t interested in creating a Web browser to rival Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer because “there are a number of fine browsers now.”
“We would not build a browser for the fun of building a browser and creating another choice,” he said. “We would only see doing that if there was a real user benefit.”
