It’s aggregation that is the valuable part, not the news or we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place and it would be newspapers that took over the world instead of google.
Aggregation of a product that is devalued the more you aggregate it. Inevitably it kills the product and you have nothing to aggregate. Google is doing that (sucking up all the ad revenue) to all kinds of publishers and i expect to see more of this.
How is Google sucking up adrev.? Publishers get revenue from Google, or they can manage ad sales however they want.
They times have changed, and it seems going back is not an option. Before Google big publishers were the default for many people, either on paper or online. Now publishers are in the headline business. Also if they write good things, people will read it still.
They lost some/much of their network effect. And sure, we can say G is sucking up revenue, but they also make it possible to advertise for whatever keyword you want, much more effectively, than publishers did. In this sense G is just a better paper, truck, road, printing press and ad-sales-house in one. Pretty hard to beat it.
