Google Domination

I see in the news today that Google has overtaken another media institution, this time ITV1, in terms of advertising revenues.

Google overtook Channel 4 last year and has been beating mediums including cinema and press rapidly in its short life.

Michael Grade is quoted in the story about the amount of regulation that ITV has enforced upon it compared to the lax environment that Google operates in. It reminded me of a number of conversations I have had recently about Google and ITV.

If Google were a TV company then there would be no way that it would have been able to grow so big and powerful so quickly. The 'M' word, monopoly, is rarely used in the press alongside Google but it is the elephant in the room. Look how quickly the forces of regulation moved when Murdoch took a stake in ITV. Now it looks like they will be forced to backtrack and possibly sell the stake they took. But has the horse bolted when it comes to Google? Its market share in the UK according to Hitwise is a shade over 85%, if that isn't a Monopoly I don't know what is and to say that it doesn't skew the market would be madness. Yet there is still no sign of intervention from regulators.

I have asked many people recently if Google can be caught and more than one person has come back with an ITV / Google analogy. It goes like this:

ITV were the dominant player in the UK terrestrial TV advertising market and nobody could see them ever being caught, then along came Channel 4 and they didn't have it all their own way all of a sudden.

The propensity for a new killer service to take out Google is probably even more likely than it was for another advertising based TV service to be launched - look at the meteoric rise of Facebook as an example when we were all MySpace mad and the next generation of social networks are already being developed - Twine. (although obviously Google do have Orkut)

The moral is things change and in digital they change twice as fast. The days of Google's dominance are not endless; they just seem that way at the moment.....