NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

As it turns out, the report was published by the News Media Alliance, a media-industry lobby group formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America, and the figure quoted by the Times—without any critical assessment whatsoever—appears to be based almost entirely on questionable mathematical extrapolation from a comment made by a former Google executive more than a decade ago. The NMA report calculates what the same proportion of the company’s revenue would be today, then further inflates this figure based on the fact that news consumption via Google’s main search is 6 times larger than via Google News (according to the NMA’s estimate of referral traffic to newspaper websites). The main reason the NMA study had to jump through the hoops it did to come up with a number for its report is that Google News doesn’t carry any advertising, and doesn’t generate any direct revenue from the headlines and excerpts of news content it provides.

Source: www.cjr.org