

Book Review- Googled: The End of the World As We Know It - physcab
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Baker-t.html?_r=1&hp

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jsz0
"Google makes money from other people's content"

Google makes money by making other people's content accessible to a wide
audience in the most efficient way. In most cases you bypass search engines
and go straight to the sites you're interested in because you have an
expectation it's worth reading most of the front page and some of the
individual stories. If a site cannot manage to capture a loyal audience they
have no one to blame but themselves. When the user is seeking out new
information with no preferred source of the content they goto search engines
because they want the most relevant results. They're not interested in going
to 20 or 30 individual sites and searching these little islands of
information. The old media is still convinced they can be the gatekeepers of
culture and information while Google focuses on giving people what they
actually want. It's pretty obvious who's going to win here.

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MikeCapone
I'm still puzzle by the argument that "Google makes money from other people's
content".

Don't these content producers realize that there's probably more than half
their traffic coming from Google? Google helps people find their stuff. How is
that bad?

~~~
brandnewlow
How so?

Google is making money from people's content. The people making the content
might be making some money, too, but Google is making much more. The content
producers are all using....Google Adsense, to try and turn Google traffic into
money. And Google has relentlessly "smart-priced" its adsense payouts down
into oblivion. So Google's scooping up content to power its index, sending
people to these sites, where they click on ads that pay Google an advantageous
share of the wealth. Sounds like they're making money off people's content.

~~~
alexandros
If they're using Adsense, it must be worth it to them. In other words, they
believe they are paying a fair price for the value they extract. The ones who
believe they can do better try alternative approaches, such as direct contact
with advertisers, among others. So why complain? AFAICT, Google does not
discriminate in favour of adsense-using websites.

~~~
brandnewlow
I'm not complaining. Just explaining how Google makes money from other
people's content.

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drenei
"Maybe in the end, even on the Internet, you get what you pay for."

I'm not sure that I want to read the book, but that was an interesting review
of it. The last paragraph had me thinking about 'free' in the context of
music. We've had free music before - radio. It was a lot more restricted than
todays 'free' music, but it was free (beyond the initial hardware purchase).
Of course there was a monetization strategy (radio = ads = physical albums
sales + other revenue).

The solution for the problems today isn't a return to yesterday. But also,
importantly, things of value yesterday aren't always going to be valuable
today (and vice versa). Things change.

~~~
Freebytes
Grooveshark (www.grooveshark.com) is an excellent example of a way to take
something that is free and monetize it in one form or another. VIP accounts
and advertising work for the site, and the record labels still can earn money
from it so they might be happy.

Someone always pays, though... it simply may not be the end user.

~~~
physcab
I hear they also have a great Artists product (artists.grooveshark.com) that
provides real-time analytics to artists so they can tour and promote their
music more efficiently :)

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enomar
For a book review, he didn't talk about the book much. Most of the article
seemed like a rehash of Google's history from the author's memory.

