Marksonland

So building off of my last entry - and a few before that - what would the world look like if the newspapers took Sam Zell's advice and pulled all their content from Google? Ignoring the effect that it would have on Google's business (irrelevant to newspapers), how would it affect the newspaper's business?

Would they still pursue their strategy of using local offline brands to deliver their content online?

Isn't the whole reason Google exists is because with so many sources and aggregator is needed? So would they have their "own" aggregator sit in the middle to replace where Google now sits?

Would that aggregator be effective if it only indexes newspaper content, not the entire web?

What would the traffic strategy for either the local brands online or the aggregator be? Given the ineffectiveness of converting off-line traffic to online users, would it be SEM?

Regardless whether the newspaper has their own aggregator or separate local brands, how would they monetize it? With Google ads?

The reality of newspaper sites is that most of their users browse pages, they don't search. There is a huge monetization disparity between browse and search page views , how would that be addressed?

In other words, given that pulling the content from Google would mean (1) a big hit in traffic, (2) no change in the prevalent monetization issues, (3) little help on the brand issues and (4) require new product thinking around aggregation, does it make sense to pull your content? To tell you the truth, maybe.