
The biggest heist in business history began quietly in August 2004 when search engine Google, now Alphabet, went public.
People were already addicted to Google and I wanted to buy shares, but not until I understood how it could make money by giving away free information. When I realized its business model was similar to ours in the news business — ads wrapped around content it had taken from newspapers and others — I bought lots of stock and wrote a memo to my CEO advising that the company do the same, in order to try and stop the looming apocalypse. He did nothing. I bought more stock.
Sixteen years later, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and and many other social media sites have eaten newspapers alive. A 2018 report from Zenith, a company that tracks ad spending, found that advertising in newspapers plummeted to only US$48 billion ($65 billion) globally in 2018, from US$107 billion in 2000, and estimated that it would drop to US$44.5 billion by the end of this year. Meanwhile, internet ad spending soared from less than US$8 billion to US$227 billion in 2018 and has been increasing ever since.
News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch was the only proprietor who understood what was about to befall the industry and tried to avert it. He publicly criticized Google and Yahoo for swiping content without paying fees and attempted to alert and organize publishers. In 2009, at a Washington forum on the future of newspapers, he said: “There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production.… Their almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it’s theft.”
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