Jane Hamsher: Has Google Destroyed the 4th Estate?

Jane-zilla ..

News outlets across the globe are struggling to keep the doors open as news advertising revenues continue to sink. As Peter Jukes at the Daily Beast rightly points out, advertising revenues peaked in 2000 at $60 billion dollars (adjusted for constant 2012 dollars). Last year, that figure was $19 billion. Where did that $40 billion go, he asks? Coincidentally, Google raked in almost that much last year in revenues — $37.9 billion — 96% of which came from advertising. Google’s incredible profits didn’t materialize out of nothing. They are derived because as the news audience has migrated online, Google has skimmed the lion’s share of news advertizing revenues for itself. That money used to go to pay for investigative reporting. Google’s glittering balance sheet basically comes from driving the 4th estate out of business .. As an outspoken Google critic, FDL has already been removed from Google News with no explanation, and repeated attempts to contact them to ask why it happened have been ignored by the company

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2012 at 7:30 AM and filed under Blog Posts, Economics, Media, Technology. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.

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