Who’s Doing Who the Favor?
“The trick is for news companies to realize their strength and value is in their content, said Porter Bibb, a managing partner of Mediatech Capital Partners. He said he was heartened to hear the statement by Sam Zell, the billionaire instrumental in taking Tribune private, that newspapers can no longer afford to give their content away to search engines like Yahoo and Google.
“I think it’s amazing that no manager of any newspaper company and old media has said, ‘It’s time for us to stop giving Google and Yahoo a free lunch,’” Bibb said. “It’s time to make them pay for what they eat.”
The data:
“Google in particular served as the biggest single source of traffic for print news websites and broadcast media sites, receiving 29.7% and 35.9% of their overall traffic from the search giant last year respectively.”
