Book Review- Googled: The End of the World As We Know It

Google makes money by making other people's content accessible to a wide audience in the most efficient way. In most cases you bypass search engines and go straight to the sites you're interested in because you have an expectation it's worth reading most of the front page and some of the individual stories. If a site cannot manage to capture a loyal audience they have no one to blame but themselves. When the user is seeking out new information with no preferred source of the content they goto search engines because they want the most relevant results. They're not interested in going to 20 or 30 individual sites and searching these little islands of information. The old media is still convinced they can be the gatekeepers of culture and information while Google focuses on giving people what they actually want. It's pretty obvious who's going to win here.

Don't these content producers realize that there's probably more than half their traffic coming from Google? Google helps people find their stuff. How is that bad?

I'm not sure that I want to read the book, but that was an interesting review of it. The last paragraph had me thinking about 'free' in the context of music. We've had free music before - radio. It was a lot more restricted than todays 'free' music, but it was free (beyond the initial hardware purchase). Of course there was a monetization strategy (radio = ads = physical albums sales + other revenue).

The solution for the problems today isn't a return to yesterday. But also, importantly, things of value yesterday aren't always going to be valuable today (and vice versa). Things change.