The New York Times’ Richard Siklos has this thought piece today on Google and whether it is a friend or foe to media companies. On the one hand, Google is siphoning ad revenue away from the traditional media and is beefing up its ability to compete with the TV industry through its acquisition of YouTube and its nascent video advertising efforts.
On the other hand, Google is a growing source of readers, customers and viewers for the media giants. Best not to mess with a good thing, or so some media companies say.
But, Siklos asks whether Google itself is a media company, on par with, say, Time Warner or News Corp. or Viacom, and offers disparate answers to this question. If a media company can be defined, as Siklos does, as an entity that aggregates audiences and sells them to advertisers, then Google is a media company.
But Google VP David Eun says that Google doesn’t create or own content and therefore isn’t a media company. “I would say we’re a conduit connecting our users with content and advertisers,” Eun says.
Of course, neither Siklos nor Eun are correct. That’s because they both assume an outmoded definition of what constitutes a “media” company. In fact, the idea of a media company sounds almost old-fashioned, a throwback to the era that spawned Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network.”
The “media” no longer consist of dominant television networks and top newspapers, with a few influential weekly news magazines thrown into the mix. The “media” today comprises not only those things, but also blogs and broadband video networks and web sites that produce original text, video and audio content, not to mention hundreds of cable and satellite programming channels.
Google is very much a part of the media landscape, and some would argue it’s at the center of the new media world, even if it doesn’t produce or own original content. Without Google as the editor, so to speak, today’s media might be nonnavigable, or certainly less navigable than it is.
The media have changed and therefore the definition of “media” company has changed. Google may wish to avoid the obligations that traditional media companies labored under by characterizing itself as a passive “conduit,” as Eun does, but there’s no doubt it’s a media company.
It’s a new kind of media company, certainly, but Google sits at the center (and runs alongside) of most businesses run by Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., The Washington Post Company and many other formerly dominant media companies. It may not yet be a content company, in the sense of producing movies or launching new publications, but it most certainly is a media business.
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:29 PM|Comments(0)
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