Google has recently suggested to give a boost to its not-so-successful Checkout service by harnessing it to online newspapers interests. Only a few months ago, Google’s haughty advice to the newspaper industry was: “You’re on your own guys. Darwin is in charge here. Adapt or face extinction.” Last November in Paris, I personally witnessed the Googlers’ poor performance in front of local media barons. It was an embarrassing mixture of unprepared ness and arrogance. Some of us felt really sorry the search giant screwed up so badly. “

However, in the long Google has finally realized that they can no longer ignore the dramatic worsening of the news media sector. US market have performed survey regarding these, and key figures from US market results are;

The best recent period was 2005. In that year, U.S. newspapers reported total advertising revenue of $49.4 billion. 96% came from print (35% from classifieds) and 4% from online. Between 2005 and 2008, things changed dramatically. Total ad revenue fell 23.4%. Print declined 26.7% (including a 42.4% drop in classifieds.)Meanwhile, online revenue soared 53.4%.

To get a more precise and recent representation, let’s compare the last available quarter (Q2 2009) to Q2 2005. Over those four years, here’s what’s happened: Total ad revenue fell 44%. Print declined 47% with classifieds plummeting 64%. But online still grew by 30% over the same period.

Google bears some responsibility in this state of affairs: it forced a large chunk of the advertising market to shift to text ads with the G-model built on large volumes and low per unit cost.

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