Yostivanich

This after­noon a post from Real Clear Mar­kets came up on Tech­meme, ask­ing “Might Google Buy the New York Times?” The ques­tion is so ridicu­lous I almost didn’t want to respond but at the same time I can see how some peo­ple would think this is a good idea. New York Times would gain the advan­tage of gain­ing access to a large fund of cap­i­tal in much the same way Dow Jones gained a ton of money in the recent deal with Mur­doch. How­ever there is one major dif­fer­ence, between News Corp and Google. I’ll even give you a hint it’s in the name. News Corp is a news orga­ni­za­tion, Google is an inter­net company.

John Ellis argues:

“Third, there’s all that con­tent. Google is a com­pany that could actu­ally make money repur­pos­ing the cul­tural and culi­nary cov­er­age, to pick just two cat­e­gories, of the New York Times, across both its Inter­net and mobile plat­forms. An acqui­si­tion of The New York Times would greatly enhance the rich­ness and reach of Google News. And should Google choose to invest in expanded news and cul­tural cov­er­age, it could greatly enhance the rich­ness and reach of The New York Times. ”

While I won’t dis­agree with the point here that Google could make money from the con­tent and it eas­ily could throw buck­ets of money at The New York Times. The com­pa­nies just aren’t a fit for each other. For one, the per­son­al­i­ties at each of the respec­tive com­pa­nies is vastly dif­fer­ent. One is a young, rather wealthy inter­net com­pany, the other is a much older, estab­lished news­pa­per com­pany. Where do the two meet? Also, Google works best a col­lec­tor and dis­trib­u­tor of infor­ma­tion not cre­ator of infor­ma­tion. They have two main prod­ucts, Search and AdSense. Both of which don’t cre­ate infor­ma­tion, rather they har­vest infor­ma­tion. The few ser­vices that Google run that cre­ate infor­ma­tion, YouTube, Blog­ger, Orkut, etc. are purely user gen­er­ated. The New York Times is vastly dif­fer­ent from that world with good rea­son. I just don’t see The New York Times being able to fit into to either Google’s plan or even fit into the company.

I some­what agree with the premise of what Mr. Ellis is say­ing in his arti­cle, how­ever I would argue that it is not even pos­si­ble, much less likely. I do think that it would be a bad deal for The Times. I don’t see where the com­pa­nies would be able to meet in terms of hav­ing a sim­i­lar goal. Google indexes infor­ma­tion, The Times cre­ates it. While these are sim­i­lar they are also vastly dif­fer­ent. Also Google News cur­rently already indexes New York Times sto­ries, so what would they gain by hav­ing direct access? Google cur­rently indexes my lit­tle blog, with under an aver­age of 500 hits a month (as of this writ­ing, please go up) every 30 min­utes or more often. I don’t see that Google is par­tic­u­larly slow with index­ing pages. That isn’t to say Google News is per­fect, it isn’t by far and needs a lot of work, but buy­ing The Times, won’t help out Google News.