Mele’s Musings

Is Google a Media Company?

The title is right, but the analysis is partially a miss.  Google is a media company even without creating its own content sites.

Picture: DigitalDaily

Article excerpt:  Type “buttermilk pancakes” into Google, and among the top three or four search results you will find a link to a detailed recipe complete with a photo of a scrumptious stack from a site called Knol, which is owned by Google. Google envisions Knol as a place where experts can share their knowledge on a variety of topics. It hopes to create a sort of online encyclopedia built from the contributions of scores of individuals. But while Wikipedia is collectively edited and ad-free, Knol contributors sign their articles and retain editing control over the content. They can choose to place ads, sold by Google, on their pages.  While Knol is only three weeks old and still relatively obscure, it has already rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. They foresee Google’s becoming a powerful rival that not only owns a growing number of content properties, including YouTube, the top online video site, and Blogger, a leading blogging service, but also holds the keys to directing users around the Web.
The rest: NYTimes.com

Musing:  What makes Google a media company is not the fact that it creates it own content sites.  It was already a media company before it did that.  Google is a media company because they control so much of the content that we see every day directly and indirectly.  The truth is that Google is a media company pretending to be a technology company, and this is what makes them so hard to compete against.  Technology companies are afraid of them, but can’t figure out how to compete with them.  That’s because technology companies make products that they try to sell to individuals.  Media companies make or distribute content that they give to customers in exchange for selling and serving ads to them.  The whole approach and point—of-view is different.  You can’t compete with Google unless you believe you are creating and distributing content, which is what media companies do.