When you say, “monetize,” what do you mean really? To make money from google ads? Or are there other ways to make money directly from a website (not including the other indirect benefits such as marketing or customer service)?

The Wall Street Journal has a view of its brand. They know what it “should” be. But people on the net make their own judgment. They always have, but now they can have a much broader view of what others are saying.

I maintain that newspaper brands compete with Google, as well as Yahoo and others, for local advertisers. I believe that newspapers should forget contextual ads and work to provide better local advertising, because they are better situated to capture that market.

This article also reminds newspapers what they can learn from Google. You mention that “Google thinks distributed, it comes to us whenever and however it can”. It is my hope that newspapers can do the same in their local markets, by finding ways to reach their local communities with whenever and however it can with better local content and local advertising.

I don’t dispute the value of the link economy–that’s an area where I mostly agree with you (http://thenoisychannel.com/?s=jarvis+link+economy).

But giving Google credit for the fact that some new brands emerge feels like giving a coin credit for flipping heads. Every zero-sum game has winners and losers, and brand longevity has never been infinite, even in the media industry. These days, the brand-name bloggers look a lot like an online version of the legacy brands you decry. The main difference is that their only means of generating income from their brand equity is advertising or self-promotion.

I’m intrigued by your assertion that getting a high PageRank (which is a bit more specific than just getting links) means a page “has merit or at least relevance as determined by the public.” Isn’t it possible that, as with the electoral process, the link economy is largely a winner-take-all economy (in the Robert Frank sense) and that it simply helps the rich get richer?

http://www.slideshare.net/dtunkelang/google-tech-talk-reconsidering-relevance-presentation

I’m going to take this sentence and go in a slightly different direction. I think brands once organized information but now impatient readers/audiences want to organize things themselves. They want to do it at the pace they want and at the depth they want. Some people want to watch an entire season of TV over a weekend, and they can do that via TiVo or iTunes or Hulu. Other people want to play a game like Portal with the developer’s commentary on and explore the game more deeply than anyone else in their city. Google can help with that, but I think we just act on behalf of what our users want in that regard and represent a trend toward user control.

How many of us have waited impatiently at the beginning of a DVD, trying to fast-forward through cross-promotions, advertisements, legal warnings, or way-too-slow DVD menus with built-in cut scenes? That’s an area where a brand has forced their experience on viewers. Guess what? Many viewers hate the “brand experience,” because they want to be active users, not passive, trapped viewers. So I think there is a trend from brand control to user control, and that’s a larger trend than any direct Google-related trend.

P.S. I’m partway through WWGD and I’m enjoying comparing my intuition against the book.

Google (/Youtube/blogs/the internet) also enables new brands to emerge out of nowhere without having to run the gauntlet of the old holders of scarcity attention. So what a mere blogger says can have as much sway as a big brand – if it gets links, which means if it has merit or at least relevance as determined by the public. In that sense, Google is uncorking the brand equity the public holds and determines and bestows it properly in a more open market of branding.

Thus Perez Hilton can challenge People. Gawker Media has twice the traffic of the LA Times. Dell Hell rises to the first page of search results for the brand Dell. And so on. Who determines those rises? The public.

It’s a brilliant strategy, perhaps even more evil than what Microsoft did to the desktop! Google has acquired the lion’s share of content creators’ brand equity for pennies on the dollar, and the victims protesting now were only too willing to sell themselves cheap when they didn’t realize the enormity of their error.

WWGD indeed–more like What Would Wal-Mart do! In any case, sheer brilliance.

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/02/14/yes-virginia-google-does-devalue-everything-it-touches/