Interesting question from Tacoda’s Dave Morgan.
Indeed, Google positions itself as a technology company in order “to pacify media companies that they want to partner with, or avoid copyright infringement lawsuits from those same companies.”
But it does so because technically, it does not own any of the content it distributes, nor does it own the rights to most of it, frankly.
Indeed, it generates 99% of its revenue alongside that content, but with all due respect, it is false to assume that “because Google generates 99% of its revenue from advertising, then it must be a media company.”
After all, if tomorrow MSFT decided to give away all of its software for free and generate revenue from advertising, would it suddenly become a media company? Probably not.
I could be wrong, but print, like TV, radio etc. is a media… so the reason why newspapers are media is that they own - or own rights to - the content they produce/publish.
Yahoo! might not publish much proprietary content, but it owns right to it… Google on the other hand, does not own the content it distributes, it owns the technology that enables the flow of traffic to the content, that makes it a technology company in the sense that Yahoo! is more discerning about where its traffic should go.
Either way, I certainly agree that “creating world-changing technology is hard. Running a great global media company is much harder.”
Dislosure: Our company, http://www.WatchMojo.com works with both Yahoo! and Google and I am a shareholder of Yahoo!
Tags: Internet & Web, Search Wars|
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Aug 31st
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