• The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, April 8, 2009 12:15 PM

Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated his company's belief that "advertising is king" during a keynote address at the Newspaper Association of America's annual conference on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. And while there may be room for other media business models, like subscriptions and micropayments, he said these would not operate on the same scale as ad-supported media, because those models rely on scarcity, while the Internet "works on ubiquity."

Meanwhile, many of the publishers at the NAA conference are struggling with the Web's "everything is free" mentality, as online dollars have not sufficiently recouped lost revenue from their traditional businesses. Schmidt's advice -- clearly not what they wanted to hear -- is to dig in their heels and fight with the rest of the Web for advertising dollars. "Advertising that is useful is going to work," he said.

In response to a question from the audience about The Associated Press's tough stance on intellectual property and fair use, Schmidt noted that Google has a licensing deal in place with the AP, but he added that publishers should "think in terms of what your reader wants. These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »