David Eun

The Google vice president who deals with print and broadcast media recently admitted that his firm cooperates with content companies, it doesn’t compete with them.

“We don’t produce or own content,” David Eun told interviewer Patrick Phillips. “What they do as a company — with journalists, news bureaus, thinking about what people want to read, producing a newspaper — that’s not what we do . . . our business model is based on connecting users with their content and bringing advertisers to their content.”

What a relief! I thought Google was ought to saddle media companies with all the costs of creating content while offering them pay-per-click ads worth just 10 percent of what they used to get from print or broadcast sales. But Eun reminds us that Google is the publisher’s friend:

“What we do is point people to where they can find content. And we make a business by putting relevant ads next to it. Our strength is in understanding what’s out there and then putting ads around it, as opposed to trying to guess what kind of content people would like and trying to sell that content ourselves.”

The full interview offers the complete win-win.