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The Real Media Consolidation: Google
By xaby | October 8, 2007
Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch and Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at HipMojo make critical calculations about Google’s (GOOG) growing advertising hegemony. Bottom line: Google controls nearly 40 percent of online advertising.
Now pair that news with the folding of TimesSelect. Consumers, as we used to be called, won’t support media and journalism with their money. Advertising will. We will become entirely dependent on advertising. And what happens when Google controls the majority of online ad revenue in this country? They’re headed there, for as a TechCrunch commenter points out, Google’s online ad revenue and share of revenue are growing faster than online advertising as a whole.
On the one hand, we should be grateful to Google for enabling the support of much new media. On the other hand, we should fear the vise in which Google holds our privates. That’s where media power is consolidating — not in old conglomerates (some of which now depend for a good bit of revenue on whom? — on Google.)
I’m not blaming Google for getting to this point. Big, old media handed them this opportunity on a platter. Google was the one company that truly understood the economics of the open network. It understood that it could grow much bigger enabling than controlling. We in media should have followed that model. We should have asked WWGD - What Would Google Do?
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