It's not Google that's killing the media.

There's more. Content creators like to complain that Google doesn't "share" its revenue. But it does—in a striking way. Google doesn't get revenue from a search when someone clicks on a link to a news site. On the contrary: Google makes money only when a user doesn't click on a media Web site, and goes to one of its advertisers instead. And we're not even talking about Google News (a dismal way of getting your news, but that's beside the point): That part of Google has no advertising at all, except on stories from the Associated Press, for which Google pays. In other words, anytime somebody uses Google services to find a media Web site, the media site gets all the revenue. There's no better sharing model than that.

It is still, however, not nearly enough. That's the rub. The total haul from news on the Web is not nearly sufficient to support everything that goes into reporting and presenting it. The reason for this has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with a la carte pricing. In every area of the media—look at $1.29 songs or $1.99 episodes of HBO shows—the issue is the same. The perceived value of individual pieces of content is much less than the perceived value of an entire HBO subscription, album, or magazine.

You can see this playing out in virtually every area of the media. Cable companies don't want you to be able to order channels a la carte; instead, they want to sell you a 60- or 300-channel package because they know that the amount that people will pay for the five channels they actually watch is a whole lot less than the $80 a month they are shelling out now. But it's the traditional print media that are getting hit hardest, and the newspapers worst of all. For many years their customers—both readers and advertisers—paid for a big package of newsprint when most folks only read a small fraction of it. In bite-size pieces, it doesn't look like it's worth as much.

This isn't fair, because hardly any news organization would be able to do what it does and get revenue only for the very small fraction of it that any reader uses. At least, not with ad rates where they are now. Something will have to change. Ad rates will have to rise. Smaller media organizations (including most newspapers, which have been doing an awful job for years anyway) will have to go out of business and create bigger economies of scale for the survivors. Some media sites are going to have to charge subscription fees. And it will all sort itself out. Painfully.

Just don't blame Google or media aggregators for the pain. It's not Google or Drudge or the Huffington Post or Newser that led media to deliver their goods a la carte. It's the technology behind the Web. Once it became possible to deliver only one song, one movie clip, or one article at a time to consumers, it became immediately certain that consumers would gravitate to that. If you only like green Life Savers, why buy the whole roll if you don't have to?

Somewhere along the line, media organizations are going to come up with pricing plans that get them out of the terrifying vortex of the 2-cent-per-ad model. Until then, though, they should be careful what they wish for.  If "promiscuous" linking by aggregators makes them unhappy, they're welcome to try to keep Google or anyone else from linking to their content. There are folks thinking about that future already. They'll be only too happy to build all new sites that merely summarize what's on the major media Web sites without linking to them at all. The nightmare the press is living through now is nothing compared with the nightmare it can create.