“As a ‘buyer’ of web content, Google has incredible dominance, so much so that the price they pay for that content is zero. If the NYTimes decided to opt out of Google tomorrow, Google users would barely notice. On the flip side, the NYTimes would see a massive decrease in traffic and hence ad revenues. Google has so much power they [don’t have to split] the revenue for organic traffic.

“Now imagine a world where search engines are truly competitive. I know it’s hard – but imagine there are say 20 search engines, each with 5% market share. And suppose they differ primarily according to which content sites they index. On the content side, suppose there are only a couple of newspapers left – maybe the NYTimes, WSJ, USA Today, and the Financial Times (which, btw, will probably be the case in a few years). In this situation the newspapers would have enough leverage to get the search engines to pay them for inclusion in their organic listings. I know that in my own case if two search engines were nearly identical except one included my favorite newspaper and the other didn’t, I’d use the one that did. I suspect a lot of other people would make the same decision.”

Post-script: If most newspapers do go out of business, the question is how, if at all, would the dynamic between Google and the surviving papers change. I put this question to Dixon. “I’m personally a believer in the ‘last-man standing’ strategy—that once all the other papers die off the NYT, WSJ, FT, etc., will be in a much stronger position,” he said. “I still doubt Google would ever need to pay them or share revenues. The problem is all the newspapers together account for such a small percentage of Google’s outbound traffic. But at least with fewer newspapers the survivors would be in a better position with respect to their own advertisers, and maybe even the NYT could charge for content.”

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