Monday, February 27, 2006
Content Wars?
by
The Googlization of media seems to be accelerating. Not content to be the king of search, Google is reaching into radio, television and print. They are starting their own Internet-payment service that will compete with eBay’s PayPal. They are testing a service that could compete with eBay itself and other etailers. They are taking on the web design market. They are raising the ire of some authors, publishers and libraries with their plans to digitize pages in copyrighted books, and offer those pages as results in search content.
The big traditional mainstream media players appear to be tired of losing market share to online media growth and the rapid rise of consumer generated media such as blogs. They are disgruntled, or at least befuddled, that their content is served as search results that makes money for Google, Yahoo, MSN and others companies, but doesn’t directly bring revenue to the people who produced the content.
In short, it appears that Google is taking on an increasing portion of the business world. Some would say the Content Wars are over and Google (et al.) won with a blitzkreig. However, Google’s hypergrowth, combined with the expanding list of battlefronts it is opening, are going to create additional challenges for the company. There may be companies that feel they have no choice but to attempt to make their content proprietary...hidden from Google searches.
I, for one, don’t think most companies could risk dropping off the search radar screen, so I doubt this will happen. However, competition sometimes can create strange moves and alliances. Remember the saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as we see how companies try to compete against the Google juggernaut in the months and years ahead.
Nevertheless, Google’s aggressiveness and pervasiveness in a wide range of services/products is sure to create a great deal of marketplace attention and increasing business (and perhaps regulatory) conflict for Google in the future. Rather than becoming key links in the value chain, Google appears to be forging a new chain from end to end.
