All Your Online Ad Revenue Are Belong To Google

More and more newspapers are deciding that they need to charge for access to their websites rather than relying on advertising. This is often portrayed as a reversion to the print norm, where the paper is really free, but I think it’s best understood as an innovation. The price you pay to subscribe to a daily newspaper is really the price of producing and distributing the physical object. The journalism is paid for by advertising. And as the latest Pew State of the Media report observes, the business issue here isn’t that there’s no online advertising, it’s that Google is reaping all the revenue.