Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

Chris Dixon writes about the current imbalance in the negotiating power between google and newpapers.

Newspapers, like all websites, are suppliers of content to Google.  In most markets, with genuinely competitive buyers and suppliers, the revenues are shared between buyers and suppliers in proportion to their relative bargaining power.  Their bargaining power depends on how fragmented each side of the market is – how many genuine alternatives each company has.

Normally there is some reasonable level of interdependence between buyers and suppliers, hence the revenue split is positive and non-negligible. Pepsi and Coke are always jostling with their bottlers about the percentage split but in the end each side usually makes a profit.

And in situations where the relative bargaining power is severely imbalanced, there are normally business mechanisms for correcting the imbalance.   For example, before Staples was founded, office supply stores were mostly mom-and-pop shops that were tiny relative to their suppliers, and hence had very little bargaining power.  The central business concept behind creating Staples was to “roll up” these shops and thereby increase their bargaining power with their suppliers.  In doing so, they were able lower their costs and increase their margins even while lowering their prices.   One of the primary reasons companies merge is to increase bargaining power with respect to buyers and suppliers.

As a “buyer” of web content, Google has incredible dominance, so much so that the price they pay for that content is zero.  If the NYTimes decided to opt out of Google tomorrow, Google users would barely notice.  (Perhaps the only content site that would matter and hence in theory could bargain with Google would be Wikipedia – but even Wikipedia only accounts for ~2% of Google click throughs).  On the flip side, the NYTimes would see a massive decrease in traffic and hence ad revenues.  Google has so much power they can split 0% of the revenue for organic traffic (and of course charge for paid links).

Now imagine a world where search engines are truly competitive.  I know it’s hard – but imagine there are say 20 search engines, each with 5% market share.  And suppose they differ primarily according to which content sites they index.  (I am not saying I’d prefer this world – I’d actually hate it – but please bear with me for the sake of argument).   On the content side, suppose there are only a couple of newspapers left – maybe the NYTimes, WSJ, USA Today, and the Financial Times (which, btw, will probably be the case in a few years).  In this situation the newspapers would have enough leverage to get the search engines to pay them for inclusion in their organic listings.  I know that in my own case if two search engines were nearly identical except one included my favorite newspaper and the other didn’t, I’d use the one that did.  I suspect a lot of other people would make the same decision.

His basic argument is that google holds the power as the aggregator of demand while newpapers power is fragmented. This is the reason behind the newspaper industry trying to join arms to increase their bargaining power vis-a-vis google. It is quite true that a more competitive search market would benefit the newspapers. Someone asked an interesting in the comments section of the orriginal post. Should bing pay to have exclusive access to NYT and WSJ to increase its market share? If NYT and WSJ has a paid model then this would make absolute sense. My sense is that if the content is free on NYT then the cost to bing to buy exlusivity to NYT content (Bing needs to cover the loss in revenue from google) would be too high to make such a deal.