Is it more inflammatory in a headline to say, "death to Google" than "death to AOL" or "death to Yahoo!"? That seems to be what everyone's going with, today.
Because today is the day that everyone's reviewing the keynote speech of longtime cable exec Leo Hindery, at the Convergence 2.0 conference yesterday. Hindery (representing the "Washington Insider" viewpoint but, seemingly, attacking his subject matter in an Infrastructure-is-King Insider kind of way) represented the media universe as consisting of three pillars:
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Content (ABC, NBC, Disney, Time Warner's content side?),
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Portals (Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and eBay) and
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"Non-Broadcast Distributors" (notably, cable and the satellites)
He put numbers to everything, so I can make fun of it more easily. Portals have a collective market cap of $225 billion, he says. Advertising represents two-thirds of this, or about $150 billion. But as the content that makes up the backbone of these portals is non-proprietary, it will be easy for the content providers to steal that money away.
Hence, death to Google. And three of the other four (I haven't found where he said which of the content providers would survive).
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