This is an excellent read .. EOF – The Google Exposure!!

http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/eof-google-exposure

D. Searls says that "search is free" but why ? Because of advertising! Isn't there an issue in his reasoning ;-)...

Sure, advertising budgets decline...but, they never ever stop. In any case, if another company does offer a compelling product and makes money off it (other than from selling ads) then I am sure, it would offer other replicas of Google products for free. Just like how Google is doing to Microsoft.

that's not totally fair as it doesn't take into account the recession, newspapers and magazines always got their money from advertising and the reason they are dying now is because advertising has moved online, and the Q4 numberon that were encouraging.
Google next revenue streams are display ads and the enterprise.

Google did not invent advertising. Advertising has been around for hundreds of years and it is not going away.

The first advertising happened at the time of the first newspapers and maybe before.

Actually, advertising – as in commercial promotion – is pretty recent in Western history, for the simple reason that prior to 1800 there were fewer times of abundance, where products or services needed to be explicitly sold to discerning buyers (snake-oil salesmen excepted). So there is no guarantee it will survive as such, much less forever.

Google will be "in the thick of it," so they be able to adapt their revenue models, and probably diversify as a result of that [I see no reason for Google not to become the "software-Apple" of XXI century, taking over the Redmond campus 'n all!].

Even though rumors of Google's impending demise many be groooooosly exaggerated, we shouldn't forget that electronic advertising is intimately tied in with its analog siblings—the most common of which are full-spread ads in newspapers and magazines (it used to be that any local newspaper could sustain on the Classifieds, but http://craigslist.org took care of that).

If, in the coming long-rumored newspaper industry upheaval, the substrate for the ads dissolves in favor of distribution-friendly electronic magazines (with surviving EXCLUSIVE/ EXPENSIVE paper-borne publications reaching perhaps at most the top 1% of the reading population), thus creating many more channels competing for the electronic "ad-dollar", the resulting glut/ overabundance of "ad space" may result in bubble-bursting, and a social reapprisal of the value of advertising. That is, rates and revenues slashed by a couple of orders of magnitude: perhaps pennies to today's tens of dollars.

Think Google hasn't yet studied that scenario? [asked as a true armchair economist – which I am.]

tl;dr? Summary?

Total online spend 2008 – $25 billion
Total print spending 2008 – $34 billion.

If the physical newspaper/magazine business died out and came online, the whole paper/magazine ad spend would go online. i.e. the online spend would increase by at least 100%.

Google is well placed to pick up a large portion of this.

woah, my comment should've been put before this was blogged

It follows that if advertising is not a bubble, then neither is Google. And it's not. It.s been in the US since 1704 (see http://adage.com/century/timeline/index.html) and isn't going away any time soon.

wtf, over a million servers? really?

David, advertising is but one form of promotion, and comes in many forms, not all of which are amenable to Googlexploitation™. Present-day advertising also has little in common with its once roots in product-announcement. Nothing lasts forever. So it's not entirely inconceivable that, as per Gresham's Law, some new, "Google-bad" forms of advertising will drive out the "good 'uns." E.g. some new models will arise that prove to be more effective in the short run than AdWorded campaigns. And then they become All The Rage® and the NextBigThing™ So, what can you do? Fuggetaboutit.

(For a comparison – look at what happened to the garage-band music business. Because of unbridled piracy of the end product, the bands had to adapt their ways and now earn their keep off live performances, while practically agreeing to give away the tracks.)