Google has been bleeding the media dry. One of the graphs shown yesterday during the antitrust hearing was about how Google has shifted it's original business model of showing ads on third party sites (where they have to give most of the revenue to those sites, funding those sites) to a business model of showing ads predominantly on it's own sites, where it keeps all of the ad revenue.
Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment. So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
The second graph here is what was shown in the hearing, and shows the numbers pulled from Alphabet's reports: https://medium.com/beyond-devices/googles-increasing-relianc... "Google Network Members" effectively refers to website owners like news publishers which display ads.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. Would you say that Ford bled blacksmiths and carriage makers dry? Technology moves on. Newspapers are dying because their business model blows in the current infoscape. People spend most of their attention on things other than news, and news is the ultimate information commodity.
> Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment.
The linked article shows that the "keeps all of it" portion has been growing faster than the "shares with third party sites" portion. I don't think it's fair to say that they shift revenue from one to the other.
> So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
This is not shown by the data in the linked article. Clicks and CPC are slightly down for "shares with third party sites" but that does not say anything about news sites in particular.
> One of the graphs shown yesterday during the antitrust hearing was about how Google has shifted it's original business model of showing ads on third party sites (where they have to give most of the revenue to those sites, funding those sites) to a business model of showing ads predominantly on it's own sites, where it keeps all of the ad revenue.
Do you have a link to the graph? My understanding was that Google's original business model was "provide a search engine, and show ads on it", and showing ads on third-party sites is newer?
(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
The graph is in the link above. The revenue shift is constantly moving away from sites where Google shares revenue with other sites, such as news publishers, and increasing on Google's own properties, which do not get shared with news publishers.
This explains why journalism is running out of money while Google is worth over a trillion. By lifting their content and keeping users (and ad views) directly on Google, Google profits at content producers' expense.
Re: "originally", I was probably wrong there. DoubleClick in 2008 was where Google absorbed this side of the ad business, I believe. But it was the side that was fundamental to journalism.
There was a time when Google could argue it's ad platforms was sponsoring the free web and all, but that's increasingly no longer the case.
"journalism" is running out of money because there is no journalism anymore, it is activism, and propaganda disguised as "journalism"
They are losing money not because of Google, but because they are in a Twitter echo chamber feeding off each other and aliening large parts of their audience
Every single year, Google's ad business shifts more revenue from the "shares with third party sites" segment over to the "keeps all of it" segment. So while Google Search used to heavily fund news, every year, Google's cut gets bigger, and news orgs' cut gets smaller.
The second graph here is what was shown in the hearing, and shows the numbers pulled from Alphabet's reports: https://medium.com/beyond-devices/googles-increasing-relianc... "Google Network Members" effectively refers to website owners like news publishers which display ads.