Who controls the news online?

It's been a while since I posted... Just been a bit busy with quarter end, EyeForTravel Asia Conference (1st and 2nd April) and then iMedia Brand Summit last week in Kota Kinabalu.

Excuses, excuses. Well, I hope to get back on the wagon and start posting more regularly again...

First up is a post from TechCrunch titled: "Does Google Really Control The News?" They answer themselves quickly saying that Google does not. That the real controller of news (in the US) is Yahoo and New York Times.

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"Google News is overshadowed by both Yahoo News and even the sites controlled by the New York Times (which includes NYTimes.com, Boston.com, HeraldTribune.com, and several other newspaper sites)...

...Yahoo News is three times as large, and Yahoo sends even more traffic to newspaper sites from other parts of Yahoo through its online newspaper consortium.
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According to Comscore's report, "Google News attracted 16.2 million unique visitors in the U.S. in February, compared to 42.3 million for Yahoo News and 46.2 million for the sites operated by New York Times Digital." Here's a chart.
A few more tidbits on fact that Google is making ad-revenue from news related search is kinda like stealing food from the news organizations.:

"Google search is a very important middleman indeed. Does that make Google like Wal-Mart a middleman of such might that it squeezes everybody else’s margins? Does that give it 'monopoly control over content distribution,' as Scott Karp tries to argue? Not exactly. Information economics work slightly differently than retail economics."

"Google does not control the news, it exposes it."

"The retail/distributor analogy is all wrong.... That is not how it works. Google doesn’t force suppliers of information to charge less for it as Wal-Mart does with suppliers of packaged goods. The money Google makes from its search ads is not necessarily money that would have otherwise gone to a “news” or content site. If Google didn’t exist, those ad dollars might have gone to an e-commerce site or a travel site or a real estate site or any number of other places. News sites have no claim to those search advertising dollars. It is incumbent upon each of us to attract an audience by having something original or interesting to say. When news sites do that, other sites link to them, and then they rank more highly in Google search results, which sends new readers their way."

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting read.