The Price of Google

Adam Thierer's making some other point in this post but his chart comparing the market capitalization of new to old media firms is fascinating. Did you know, for example, that at $214 billion the market capitalization of Google is about seven times that of the entire American newspaper sector ($31 billion)? Now admittedly, in part that just shows that the newspaper sector is small.

But it also certainly reminds me of the circumstances that prevailed before the AOL-Time Warner merger (speaking of which, Time Warner's market cap is a bit below $60 billion). Maybe Google's just hugely overvalued. Or maybe not. Maybe this points the way to the future of news operations. Maybe after another decades of attrition pure aggregation functions like Google News won't work so well since there's so little actual news being written. Maybe the continued decline of newspapers will start to be a drag on the blogosphere. Maybe a newspaper chain gets picked up for a song as a kind of loss-leader for Google News, Google Reader, and Blogger. Or maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about -- why, after all, would you take business advice from me?