Google has become the "favorite bogeyman" of newsosaurs around the Web, says TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. Over the weekend,
New York Times contributor
Nicholas Carr called Google the most powerful middleman in news. In a blog post, he said: "When a middleman controls a market,
the supplier has no real choice but to work with the middleman - even if the middleman makes it impossible for the supplier to make money."
But how powerful is Google, really? If we're
talking about Google News, Schonfeld says the search giant isn't as powerful as you might think. According to comScore, both Yahoo and the
New York Times' family of sites overshadow Google News
in U.S. traffic. In February, Google News attracted 16.2 million uniques, compared to 42.3 million for Yahoo News and 46.2 million for the New York Times Co. Both sites are three times as large as
Google News, Schonfeld says, discounting the theory that Google News is the de facto middleman of news.
Of course, Google's search engine also sends a hefty amount of traffic to news
sites, too, although this was not measured here. For Carr, this might be the bigger question: do Google's properties control access to news sites? Schonfeld notes that TechCrunch receives roughly a
third of its traffic from the search giant. "I have no idea whether this is representative of other news sites, but it wouldn't surprise me," he says. "Google search is a very important middleman
indeed," though it's still far from a monopoly.
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