Newspaper people should pay attention to this post from John Battelle. He highlights some key points about the value of Google page views and the threat of Google someday owning vertical destinations, not just the point of decision. Also, isn’t it interesting to consider that Yahoo! could actually be better off switching to AdSense instead of building its own contextual ad platform?

Battelle is linking to this post, with this key quote:

To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment. Online businesses which struggle against this new reality will pay opportunity costs both in online advertising revenue as well as product success.

What does that mean for your newspaper?  You should think about it.