Google Now May Have a Saviour in the UK
February 17, 2009
One of the dead tree crowd in the UK–The Daily Telegraph–rustled my pinfeathers with “Google’s UK Chief Matt Brittin Could Prove a Saviour.” I thought Google UK had a different chief, but I guess I am behind the times. The former chief–an Oracle escapee–must not have been a chief. Rupert Neate set me straight on that matter here. The article makes much of the 40-year-old Googler as a person concerned with the fate of dead tree publications like The Daily Telegraph. Mr. Neate tells me that the “6ft 3in tall” Mr. Brittin is a bronze medal rower (1998 World Rowing Championship). Mr. Brittin also “joined Google last January after three years at Trinity Mirror, as the person who made the “greatest individual contribution to new media” in 2008.”
Now the meat of the story–assuming the résumé of a Googler is not the point of the article–seemed to be summed up in this quote:
“Many publishers are partners of Google and we work together by providing targeted advertising to their websites so they can make money out of dead space,” he says. “In the last three months of last year we gave away $1.4bn (£970m) of revenue to publishing partners for adverts on their sites. All we are trying to do is help traditional media in a new environment.”
There are some other interesting items about creativity, Google’s DNA, and mobile telephony. But the point of this article is that Google is the publishers’ pal.
My research suggests that Google is a profit-making enterprise learning that its products and services can ignite strong reaction, costly litigation, and embarrassing public squabbles with people who don’t win rowing championships and work at Google.
The Google is an information company. It has developed an end-to-end platform. Users are just beginning to get a sense of what the platform can do. Google itself has seemed reluctant to identify some of the Google infrastructure’s key functions. No surprise. With journalists who wax poetic over a rowing championship, why fiddle with the rosy tint illuminating the Google.
I still don’t get the “saviour” part. Traditional media are behind in a rowing competition of sorts. Not even Google’s Mr. Brittin can pull a pal’s oar hard enough to reverse the accelerating decline. If push comes to shove, Mr. Brittin and the other Googlers, in my opinion, will save themselves, not traditional media. Shareholders and regulators expect nothing less. To ignore fiduciary responsibility creates serious problems for Google.
For more of Google “saving” the newspaper business, read this Valley Wag exclusive here. Lots of Google publishing activity methinks.
Stephen Arnold, February 17, 2009
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