Google Is Becoming a Media Company

[Commentary] Google, despite its protestations to media companies that it is here to help them, not compete with them, is officially becoming a media company.

Google has, of course, many win-win advertising rev-share partnerships with media companies. But you know what's totally awesome for Google? When it doesn't have to share revenue! Which it can do by buying media companies like Yelp.

Yep, Yelp is a media company: It offers content to consumers. It's gussied up in social-media dress, but the bottom line is you go to Yelp or use its mobile app to access its content. Yelp, of course, gets its content basically for free, because it's all user-generated. So if Google buys Yelp, it gets 100% of the advertising revenue, because it doesn't have to rev-share with a pesky little media company, because Google itself becomes a media company -- one that doesn't have to pay media people to create media.

What's hilarious about Google chasing local-listings site Yelp in 2009 is that, back in 1997 -- last century! -- Microsoft also was trying to get into the local-listings business. The lesson here: It's time to ignore Google's insistence that it doesn't want to be a media company. The fact that it is not, like Microsoft in 1997, hiring a ton of journalists is meaningless -- because, well, even media companies (except, weirdly, AOL) have stopped hiring journalists. Mark my words: By not hiring journalists, but instead dominating the user-generated content business by buying companies such as Yelp, Google will become a massive media company (that, among other things, will kill off the city-and-regional magazine market, and what's left of local alternative newspapers).