Today marks a landmark newsletter as we welcome our first guest from the highest echelons of Google.
Richard Gingras has been one of the most influential figures at the intersection of news and tech over the past 40 years.
He’s seen it from multiple angles: As a journalist, as an internet pioneer - but most notably as VP of Google News, and the architect of the Google News Initiative.
Our 40-minute pod ran more than an hour over time as he shared tough truths and triggering insights about how he sees news failing in a fracturing digital landscape.
We talk about whether there will be a sustainable future for online news, and his views on advertising, subscriptions, and entirely new revenue streams.
He delivers a rare and unapologetic insider take about how Google manipulated the evolution of digital news and why.
Get ready, because a lot of what he says will be challenging. For starters, he doesn’t accept that news’ money went to Google, dismissing it as a demonising meme.
My 30-year experience has been that when news and tech talk, it’s in different languages, with conflicting goals and perspectives. I call it the French/Swahili paradox.
I created Future Media to translate that. I’d argue this is the closest I’ve gotten so far in that mission, so strap in, and let’s go…
Before we dive in, welcome to paying subs from The Daily Mail, publishing platform Mediality, the Australian Society of Authors, the UK Independent Publishers Alliance, and ad platform Taboola, as well as new free subs from Comcast, Reddit, Apple News, Universal Music in London, The Seattle Times, and the AI team at Microsoft in Seattle, among others.
And g’day to colleagues from my favourite Substacks including at The Media Brain, at The Growth Memo, at After Babel, at Upturned, my good mate and co-host at his self-titled Substack, and of course at . Appreciate you all 🙏
Buckle in. Settle back. Here’s how Google has seen the 25-year tug-of-war between journalism and tech from the guy who architected it.
Ricky: Welcome Richard. This pod exists to navigate the collision between Big Tech and Big Media.
It’s fractious and isn’t working in the best interests of you, me, Google, the world, or humanity in general. It feels like every fight needs a winner and a loser.
But I believe everyone will benefit more if we can find a way to work together, and we can and should do better.
You’ve been the epicentre as VP of Google News and the Google News Initiative (GNI) - both sources of wins and losses for the news industry over two decades…
Gingras: “First of all, the fractured relationship between tech companies and the publishing industry is deeply problematic. We live in societies that are polarised.
“We live in societies that, to my mind, speak too often through memes as problems and memes as solutions; simplistic, not nuanced and not effective.
“If we have conversations through memes, we also tend to demonise. That’s not constructive and doesn’t move us forward.
“The sad thing is that’s become part of the relationship between the news industry and tech, and I think it’s deeply unfortunate.
“And I understand the dynamics. When I was first at Google 15 years ago, I could go around the globe and people would almost bow down.
“I felt like there was a halo on my head because it was Google. That was absurd.
“It’s equally absurd today that when I walk in and try to have a conversation, I know that two by fours (planks of wood) are coming at my head.
“So, I think that’s an important part of the conversations we should be having to move all this forward.”
Ricky: Let’s dive in. I’ve covered wars, run global newsrooms, worked in tech, founded an AI company, and now I’m a creator on Substack.
I have seen the many sides too, so I try to bring them together through my belief that the world gets to a better place faster if we work collectively and collegiately.
But for me, that’s stopped because Big Tech’s goal is not to build a better internet any longer, but rather to make more money. I’m interested in your perspective.
Gingras: “You mean on the tech side?”
Ricky: Tech is seeing huge revenue growth, and that money seems to be coming from publishing, which is being suffocated.
Gingras: “Part of the challenge is accurately diagnosing the problems and how these have impacted the news industry and society overall.
“We should go there on both counts because there are deep misunderstandings.
“One benefit of my experience is that - like yours - I do feel that it (working in media and tech) gives you a better sense of the questions you should be asking.
“To the point you made, one of the things that’s disturbed me in the dialogues - one of the simplistic memes - came up at a conference in South Africa recently.
“The opening speaker, a journalist, started out with the phrase that tech was siphoning ad dollars from publishing.
“There’s that meme again. It’s technically inaccurate. It’s not factually correct.
“There’s almost no comparison between the ad ecosystem of the past and the present, so, the notion that ad dollars went from papers into Google is inaccurate.
“I can describe the disruption simply. The Dallas Morning News or Sydney Morning Herald in 1985 were the internets of their communities.
“You went to them for everything. It wasn’t just city council coverage. It was also movie times, stock quotes, sports scores, commentary and the fashion section.
“The internet changed all that, and I’m always trying to think of how best to explain this.
“Those of us old enough to remember newspapers know that we shared the sections of the paper and typically argued over who got which first.
“It was almost never about the front section. It was about the sports, or maybe mom wanted the style section, or food, or whatever.
“Those were the sections that drove most of the engagement. They also drove all the advertising.
“What happened (once the web arrived) was that people had so many other places to go. Newspapers got whacked.
“They lost the audience for the very type of content that drove the advertising model and 30 per cent of revenues disappeared into classified platforms.
“Some are owned by news companies - Realestate.com owned by News Corp - but it’s no longer on the same balance sheet so there’s no more cross-subsidy for news.
“Two other major ad categories were department stores, but they barely exist now. They’ve faded into e-commerce. Dozens of ad pages disappeared.
“Another is supermarket discount coupons, which have disappeared into loyalty programs.
“Eighty per cent of newspaper revenue went. Circulation revenue (the cover price of the paper) was less than 10 per cent. It was all advertising, and it all went away.
“You were left, unfortunately, with news organisations where the only thing they had left was being a node on the internet.
“My point is that advertising didn’t disappear to Google. It disappeared into the internet.”
“The internet created competitive content and hugely effective advertising. Something people don’t consider is how powerful that is for the economy.
“Small businesses typically didn’t advertise in newspapers because it wasn’t targeted or efficient, but now they can.
“More than 60 per cent of Google’s advertisers are small businesses because they couldn’t do that before.
“It’s an unfortunate misunderstanding when people say Google owes news because it took their revenue. Not true, and even if it were, we built a better mousetrap.”
Ricky: I don’t disagree with 95 per cent of that. News was too slow to adapt. It should have invested when it had money and failed to take a strategic view.
All true. I know. I was there. But there’s a significant difference between the financial impact on news, and the societal impact of not having news.
Losing classifieds hurts, but it’s probably something you can live without. If the money moves somewhere else, then society doesn’t suffer.
But the loss of quality news and information, the plurality of voices, the lack of shades between red and blue - a lot of that’s gone because news can’t fund itself.
When the news industry pivoted to digital 15 years ago, it was sustainable. We knew our audiences. We could sell ads. We had to tighten our belts, but we could survive.
That’s now changed. The ad market has kept growing in high single digits every year, worth tens of billions, but none is flowing down through the ecosystem.
You have a catcher’s mitt at Google. So does Meta, and Amazon. It catches everything. The impact is that the news industry is silenced or shut down.
The only winner is Big Tech. The clear loser is the news industry. This flows down to the person in the street as less information and less trust and less knowledge.
Could Google have done a better job of sharing the upside of the internet?
Gingras: “There’s a lot to unpack there, but let’s get to the core. I mean, you’re correct, right.
“In this changed environment, the backbone news organisations that we relied on were troubled and disrupted, and many were made unsustainable.
“One point I’ll disagree with you on though, is that we have a far greater diversity of voices now than before, but to some extent that’s problematic.
“But you’re correct. We need to figure out how we as a society best sustain the press.
“To your point about why news organisations didn’t transition more effectively… that’s a problem right across the news industry, both legacy and emerging.
“There’s a complete lack of serious business and market analysis. How would they actually understand what products they need to build to fit the market?
“On the legacy side, it’s led by people who know how to work the machine and cash the cheques but have no sense how to build products for the market.
“The emerging players have a similar problem but for different reasons.
“Many are founded by journalists. They are very noble but have no understanding of business, or market analysis. They’ve no understanding of business strategy."
“They think that they’ll survive on philanthropy, government handouts, or revenue they manage to extract from platforms. Those are all false Messiahs.
“One thing I was responsible for at Google was how we surfaced news in search and Google News.
“Another was Google’s work trying to help the ecosystem by driving innovation through the GNI. I wouldn’t say it’s been effective. Somewhat effective maybe.
“I often hear (from publishers) they need to experiment with new business models. That’s nonsense.
“The business model is straightforward. It’s advertising, or subscription. Maybe membership. Maybe event revenue. The question is which work for which product.
“Look at large national publications.
“The NY Times was immensely successful once it figured out how to play in the internet effectively. Ten million subscribers and doing extremely well.
“Certain niche information products, like political news say, is very successful digitally. Look at Politico. High value information for an audience willing to pay.
“Certain niches like environmental content, have healthy philanthropic support because it is mission driven. Philanthropy is comfortable giving a bunch of money.
“The local arena is a different story. That’s where I think - and I know you have noted - it can be a community ad supported model.
“My point is that there are models that work, but to get to them, publishers have to use basic business strategies.
“That begins with understanding people’s information needs, and the potential revenue streams there for them, and then rigorously executing against that.
“That’s largely not happened in the news publishing industry unfortunately.”
Ricky: Let me share my perspective from the newsroom floor and I’d like your thoughts. I recall three transformational events.
First, I was in the room at News UK when we did the original deal with Google in 1999. Google wanted permission to reference our journalism for search.
We sat down as a leadership group and agreed to allow it. We believed we were experts at selling ads, so more traffic meant more revenue. That was the original sin.
The second was Google’s DoubleClick acquisition in 2007. That was the moment Google pivoted from being a search engine to an ad business.
Google being discovery (search) and monetisation (ads) was the dawn of the frenemy era.
The third was the GNI, Google News and Discover and various other initiatives, which conned publishers into believing Google was solving distribution.
What I warned about, and then saw firsthand, was the news industry giving up the three essential elements of its business: Discovery, distribution, and monetisation.
News became a widget in Google’s assembly line, and it seemed obvious to me that news would struggle to survive if its ability to control its destiny evaporated.
Was the news industry wrong to give all of those up?
Gingras: “Again, I think each one of those are very valid things to discuss, and we should look at them individually because there’s always nuance.
“Should publishing companies have been more innovative? The answer without question is yes.
“How much would that have changed things? Probably quite a bit for those who truly innovated, but as we know, often that did not happen.
“Let’s start with traffic. I don’t think there was a decision that you could have made differently.
“It was not the case in 1999 that Google was going to pay you to be on the web or pay you to be indexed in search. It wasn’t going to happen. You know that.
“Sometime around 2005, Rupert Murdoch said we’re not going to be indexed and we’re going to pull out (of search). He realised months later that wasn’t wise.
“At that point, and still true today, is that search is the largest newsstand on Earth that publishers don’t pay for. And it did - and does - send lots of traffic.
“One thing that’s unfortunate - and I find myself saying this to publishers worried about losses in traffic - is that they’ve never taken good advantage of that traffic.
“They have awful digital experiences, and they don’t spend time really thinking about how they take this Discovery traffic and convert it.
“I used to give these talks and say that when I look at your site, it seems you spend your time designing the homepage, but no time on article pages.
“The truth is all your Discovery traffic isn’t coming into your nice grand entryway. It’s coming in through the bathroom window. It’s coming in through the garage. So are you doing that correctly? What about those article pages?
“When I go to those article pages, they’re overwhelmed with ads. It doesn’t tempt you to say: Oh gosh, let’s go back to that brand for more. That’s unfortunate.”
Gingras then pivots to predict future search volume trends.
“Search traffic will likely decline over time. It hasn’t yet in the data that we’ve seen and others show, but it depends on the content category.
“Hard news hasn’t (lost) much, but if you’re doing travel content, it’s a very different story.”
Future Media has been tracking this trend for two years now.
“The DoubleClick acquisition was significant, but it’s only a small part of the business. The motherlode is search advertising - and it’s a perfect model.
“Listen to a marvellous podcast episode on Acquired about the evolution of auction-based advertising between 1998 and 2007. It’s brilliant.
“That’s the bulk of the business, but if we had to peel off DoubleClick tomorrow - and we may be told we have to - I don’t think it’ll matter much.”
Divesting it is a key demand following Google’s conviction as an ad tech monopoly.
Gingras: “The network business has been declining for, boy, I don’t know, nine or 10 quarters consecutively.”
Alan: I agree it’s a small part of Google’s business, but it’s a significant part of publishing’s revenue. Did publishers miss opportunities to build their own ad networks?
Gingras: “There’s a big difference between display and direct sold advertising.
“At Village Media (a local network in Canada he chairs), 75 per cent of our revenue is direct sold to merchants and institutions in the community.
“Programmatic is a tiny portion and very carefully filtered because we don’t want to soil the experience.
“The ad network environment is extremely competitive as you know but should publishers have built or owned those platforms, I would say yes.
“But one thing I know having been in this business a long time is that the news industry isn’t very good at working together.”
Ricky: I was recently in Madrid with 700 publishers and that was my narrative: If you want to lobby, if you want leverage, you must move collectively.
I’m an equal opportunity cynic and willing to criticise my own industry for its failures and BS as much as Google’s. I’ve seen five generations of leaders fail so far.
Gingras: “Those collectives tend not to work because the big guys won’t play together.”
Ricky: I want to go back to discovery. Publishers have relied on search for the past 25 years, with some social for a while.
Search delivered ~80 per cent of traffic, and I can validate your point about the homepage as just two or three per cent came direct.
But if search isn’t going to be the discovery mechanism in future - and as AI Overviews takes the traffic - what’s the right discovery strategy for publishers?
Gingras: “It depends on what kind of a news product you’re talking about and what market you’re approaching.
“I would concede that over time, my sense is that discovery traffic via search engines will decline.
“Google’s mission was to organise the world’s information and make it accessible and useful, but it was not to organise the world’s websites and drive traffic to them.”
“That was largely what it did, but it’s not necessarily what it’s going to be going forward because what our users are looking for is answers.
“An unfortunate consequence of the open web is there are, what I would call, Tragedies of the Commons.
“A good example is recipes. Search for a recipe and you find a bunch of sites that give you a history of a spoon and fork before you get to the ingredients.
“And all because they think Google respects time on site and will expose a bunch of ads to you. But it’s not a great user experience.
“So not surprisingly, if you ask for an apple pie recipe, Google is now going to provide a better answer for apple pie recipes.”
Ricky: Let me push back on that because this is what actually happened.
As publishers became more reliant on search, they outsourced how to be seen and believed everything Google told them.
The advice was to drive more page views because more page views meant more money. They were told to do this, or that, and make pages more SEO friendly.
A billion-dollar industry of people now work in SEO who are paid by publishers just to drive additional traffic and additional engagement based on that advice.
That’s why you have articles about how a spoon works. It’s not because publishers believe it’s relevant. It’s because that’s what Google advised them to do.
Gingras: “Well, I don’t know who advised them to do so. It wasn’t Google.
“I don’t want to suggest by any means that everything Google did was flawless. I don’t want to be naive, or or even disingenuous on that point.
“But I know my constant advice to them was not to waste money on SEO, because from Google’s perspective, it didn’t really much matter.”
“Like metadata. Forget the metadata. We ignore the metadata. What we’ll analyse is the content that you put forth. Full stop.
“But yeah, you did get SEO industries that spun all kinds of dreams and people paid for it - and probably incurred bad practices along the way.
“And it’s not like all those recipe sites came from newspapers. A lot of them (were people who) said: Gee, we can make money on recipes. We’ll manufacture a bunch and make a bit of coin off programmatic.
“As I say, it’s a Tragedy of the Commons. Everyone went there to take advantage to the point that they soiled the space.
“I think you’re making a number of very convincing arguments, and I agree with a lot of them.”
Alan: I’d also point out you’re under-appreciating a key nuance.
Often when Google said it was making the web better - privacy sandbox, AMP, even SEO - what would get confused is what’s beneficial for the internet versus what’s beneficial for publishers versus what’s beneficial for Google.
Often Google would hold out what’s better for the internet when the reality was closer to the fact it benefits Google - and it certainly doesn’t benefit publishers.
Gingras: “I think it’s absolutely true that Google would look at the dimension of what’s good for the internet at large was generally beneficial to Google.
“And there was less of a focus on what was good for certain categories of publishers.
“The one area where, frankly, we did put focus - and we can discuss whether it was enough or whether it was effective - was the news industry.
“One of those was the Google News Initiative (GNI), which I architected as much as anyone else inside Google.
“It was a recognition that Google’s business is better in open societies, and open societies are more likely to remain open if you have a strong press.
“There were lots of reasons why we wanted to do that.
“We figured if we could drive an effective transformation; enable a sustainable news industry, it would take some policy pressure off us. That’s a pretty logical equation to make.
“When we did the GNI, there were two objectives.
“One was to drive effective, sustainable transformation.
“And two was, yes, we should leverage some benefit from the fact that we’re trying to do what no-one else is.”
Ricky: OK. I sense that you personally see the importance of creating of news and analysis for society, but did Google?
Gingras: “Oh gosh yeah. We spent well over a billion dollars on it over 10 years.
“I hear snarky responses that this was just like a tiny percentage of Google’s overall revenue, and that’s true, but who else was doing anything to drive that change?
“I don’t say that to pat myself on the back. I think it’s profoundly sad.
“I mean it wasn’t industry news associations that were investing in change or trying to drive innovation.
“GNI was effective in some areas, and it was not effective in many areas, largely because we couldn’t control it.
“On the revenue side, GNI put a lot of focus on subscription growth. Google even developed subscription tools.
“But we neglected to see the opportunity for certain kinds of advertising that publishers could leverage, like local ads v query-based advertising.
“I don’t claim any particular success or pride at what we did with the GNI. I will say at least we tried, and at least we put some money behind it.
“In people’s eyes, maybe not enough, but I’ll say the same thing. Where else was anyone putting money into it?
“Even governments weren’t doing tax credits. They could have done that to drive more resources to news organisations to be innovative.”
Ricky: I’ve been vocal that one way Google and industry can work more sustainably together is by recognising that news has a special value to society.
It needs to exist in the same way that governments require broadcasters to fund and broadcast a certain amount of news programming every day.
Couldn’t we organise for Google to ensure a certain minimum amount of traffic is guaranteed to publishers?
Gingras: “I actually don’t because it gets artificial pretty darn quickly, and there are different circumstances today as we see AI come into the equation.
“But remember, all we did was drive traffic. There was no query that didn’t result in traffic.
“We couldn’t force people to ask more news queries. As we’ve often said, news queries are one per cent of overall queries, and a lot of those are ambiguous.
“News queries are also the queries where you’d never find an ad, because there are no advertisers who want to go against news.
“So, I don’t see any effective way to do what you suggest without putting your finger on the scale.
“It wouldn’t be about driving more traffic. It would be driving more consistent traffic to publisher X versus publisher Y versus publisher Z.
“That obviously can be very problematic.”
Ricky: Let’s examine that. Publishers want to write the news, and consumers want to consume it. That supply and demand matrix has worked for more than a century.
Publishers rightly argue that answering a search query without linking to the source article is troubling.
AI Overviews and other AI products have been coming for some time, yet publishers have seen their ranking diminishing and not been able to get an explanation.
Do you think society has changed and Google’s search algo has stayed the same? Or has search’s algorithm changed to game the system for money?
Gingras: “I think it’s much more the latter than the former.
“And by the way, it’s correct to say that journalism has a high value to society, but the unfortunate problem is that it’s not true in the marketplace.
“If you look at the Reuters Institute reports, the number of people who have an interest in serious news is in single digits.
“If you broaden news to everything - y’know, news content about knitting, it’s a different story. So there is a mismatch, and it’s always been a mismatch.
“Back in the days of newspapers, the frontpage didn’t make the money. It lost the money. The other sections subsidised it.
“The other thing I’ll say - and I actually shouldn’t because it’s not monetary - but we’ve seen data for a long time about declining trust in media.
“This is provocative, but I’m 74 and don’t mind being provocative.
“When people point fingers of blame, politicians say bad things, or argue we don’t have enough media or literacy training, let’s blame Facebook, let’s blame social…
“(They don’t) step back and ask why society doesn’t trust them and or value us… perhaps we better build that trust… maybe we do this differently?
“Have they actually done research to understand who trusts them versus who doesn’t, and why?" Maybe that might change how they do certain things.”
Alan: This story began a long time ago. I’d argue with cable news in the 1990s. That’s done more damage to the psyche of people than anything that Meta has done.
Gingras: “I think that’s true, and I’ll take you back further. You can go back to Plato. He said democracy is the least worst form of government.
“Democracies are chaotic, and they are, and they will be destroyed by the freedoms they enable.
“If you then map the progression, starting with Gutenberg (the start of mass reach print), was this the start of the Enlightenment?
“No, it was the trigger of the Reformation - challenging the church, disrupting societies. Most of publishing back then was about mysticism.
“The first mass press was technical manuals. They stimulated the industrial revolution because people could understand how to replicate goods and procedures.
“There was no golden era of truth, but with every progression in communications tech, you generate more opinions and more difficulty in achieving consensus.
“Look at radio. In 1987, Reagan put a stop to the fairness doctrine. That was the start of partisan, extreme talk radio. Hugely problematic.
“Then you get to the cable industry. Satellites made 500 cable channels possible. I was in the room when Ted Turner announced CNN.
“His vision was that news could finally go deep on a story and not limited to a 90-second bulletin. It was a nice vision.
“What he learned was going deep was expensive and the audience wasn’t there for it. So, guess what? Chat shows make a whole lot of sense.
“They’re cheap, and conflict in chat shows is even better, so let’s figure out how to polarise and divide people.
“Then the cable news networks realised they would focus on a cohort. News Corp chose a cohort. MSNBC chose a cohort.
“I don’t have much regard for either because all they do is demonise the other. They are the polarisation problem.
“It started with them, and yes, the internet made it worse, but when I hear Facebook started the problem, I urge people to look at that history.
“I’m not a big fan of partisan news because it doesn’t help our society come together.”
Ricky: I appreciate your considered commentary, but I’m going to challenge you.
The US is only four per cent of the global population, and we have a world wide web. The clue is right there in the first word: World.
America’s polarisation problems are not reflected around the globe. I’m in a different country every few weeks and there are problems, but nothing like the US.
America has created its own unique problem.
Gingras: “That’s a fair point. We should also acknowledge that around the world in the past 20 years, we’ve had 15 or 20 democracies elect authoritarians.
“Obviously we are seeing those trends, but to your point, it would be an interesting analysis to look at those countries to see why.
“But I think it’s a very fair point. The information infrastructures in countries are different. The policy structures are different. The mix and means of communication are different.
“And as a result, you have those significant differences of how things progressed. No question.”
Ricky: We have a beautiful patchwork quilt of a world, with different people with different opinions at different times for different reasons, but we have a worldwide web that sits over the top of it.
By and large, Google runs that web. It’s become Google’s web, not the worldwide web. Google controls all of it.
Do you think it makes sense to have one single structure for the web, or do you think it’s an inevitability that a splinternet is going to emerge?
Gingras: “Well, I mean, not surprisingly, I have a hard time with the phrase Google controls the internet. It’s an open protocol.
“Yeah, we operate as a search engine against that. We don’t control what the internet is.
“We are seeing a splintering though. The global web is no more. It’s quickly devolving into sovereign internets incredibly quickly.
“In some cases, for good reasons but also very damaging.”
Ricky: I just did a survey that identified 150 countries that were either in the process of, or have already, introduced sovereign laws around data or privacy.
The splinternet is now so endemic that it’s either going to be an evolution, or the end of the open web.
So can I ask you about that because you have access to data and a scale most people would never see. What do you think is the cause, and what will be the outcome?
Gingras: “I don’t have the data, but I have spent 15 years travelling the world on this stuff.
“Another leg of my work at Google was public policy. I have that background. I worked for the Carter White House for a time.
“So I do have that window on it, and I think it’s largely this.
“The web happened and everyone kind of looked at it as a glorious thing. Governments had no clue what to do with it, but ultimately they woke up.
“Every country and every leader now wants some degree, if not absolute, control over the information ecosystem in their country. Full stop.
“That can be good, bad, or indifferent depending on their views and approaches, but I think that’s exactly what happened.
“They said: Whoa, this global internet thing is kind of problematic. It’s impacting our culture. Our kids are seeing things from around the world that they didn’t see before. It’s influencing our political sphere. It’s influencing industry. We’re gonna have a say about this.
“I did an internal strategy paper once where my main point was that Google needed to recognise that while we had developed an amazing business, we were in the middle of everything.
“It told leadership not to be surprised if the spotlight was forever on us, particularly as a search engine, because we were in the middle of cultural change, political change, industrial change, and countries are going to have their say.
“And right now, that’s what we’re seeing happen.”
Ricky: Alan and I have spent what feels like countless hours covering the three Google antitrust trials.
And the way Google spoke about the web in its court documents felt to me like it believes it controls the open web.
Even if that wasn’t a strategic imperative, it’s the default because of search, Chrome and programmatic advertising.
Any one of those has a big influence on the web. All three of them mean it is the web. Alan, would you say that’s fair?
Alan: I think that’s fair, but I would also add YouTube.
Ricky: Oh yes, and then the video market leader as well, which is also owned by Google. When you add all four legs together, you propping up the entire table, right?
Get Alan’s answer in the next post as we dive deeper into Google, news, and what the future of information. See you then…
