22
September
2008
|
10:46 AM
America/Los_Angeles

GOOG Founders Could Buy All US Newspapers and Still Have $12bn

Valleywag reports that entire US newspaper business is valued at $20 billion. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are worth about $16 billion each.

Foremski's Take: US newspapers didn't realize GOOG is a media company until it was too late. Google was able to scrape its content virtually for free, from newspapers and other web sites, and sell advertising around that content. Newspapers spend huge amounts of money to create their content.

Newspapers, and other media companies, have allowed Google to commoditize content, and retain the value in the aggregation and distribution.

Yet the technology for aggregation and distribution is a commodity -- content is not a commodity.

Once the content creators and owners realize that simple fact, then we might have a turnaround in the media sector. If not, then the media sector is next for a bailout--it is too important to fail.