Jonathan Taplin:
Since 2000, recorded music revenues in the United States have fallen to $7.2 billion per year from $19.8 billion. Home entertainment video revenue fell to $18 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2006. United States newspaper ad revenue fell to $23.6 billion in 2013 from $65.8 billion in 2000. And yet, by every available metric, people are consuming more music, video, news and books. During that same period, Google’s revenue grew to $74.5 billion from $400 million.
The former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, estimated that Facebook had “sucked up $27 million” of the paper’s projected digital advertising revenue in the last year by essentially keeping Guardian readers on Facebook, rather than linking them to the Guardian site.
“They are taking all the money,” he noted. “They have algorithms we don’t understand, which are a filter between what we do and how people receive it.”
Source: Forget AT&T. The Real Monopolies Are Google and Facebook. – The New York Times
