Jon Fine of
Business Week echoes
The Economist's view that increasingly, it's Google's world. The company announced three big deals in the last few weeks "with a lovely sense of
orchestration and crescendo." Those would be a content distribution partnership with the Associated Press, a video clip syndication partnership with Viacom, and the announcement that it would be the
exclusive search provider for News Corp. and MySpace. The latter, of course, is the most impressive. It's also the most conventional, Fine says, because it's no different than any of its scores of
newspaper partnerships. But MySpace could be the last great potential search partner to come around for some time. In fact, it's unlikely that another site will be able to amass as many users and page
views. According to Fox Interactive Media President Ross Levinsohn, there will now be a Google search box on every MySpace page. The Viacom deal points to an entirely new way to syndicate ad-supported
video across the Web. It also gives Google's thousands of tech-geek employees a new testing ground for completely ad-supported, Web-based TV. Fine says the AP deal is a win for journalism, because it
shows how Google has no intention of getting into journalism, like Yahoo tried. However, Google News and Google's search partnerships with newspapers continue to cannibalize on areas like classified
and retail advertising, as users increasingly search for relevant news pieces rather than staying on one site. Google's power keeps growing, even though search is free and companies like Yahoo and Ask
and MSN keep spending ridiculous amounts of money to keep up. Meanwhile, the company continues to grow its market share while making more money per search than its competitors.
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