English Quiz 175

(English Quiz 175)

1. Tellingly, the most valuable media company in the world right now is not Disney or News Corp. or Time Warner (owner of Time) but Google, which helps people find stuff on those endless online shelves. Google makes virtually all its money--$10.6 billion in revenue last year and $3.1 billion in after-tax profit--selling advertisements. But except for a few endeavors like Google Maps, it's a media firm that produces no content. Rather than take on established media outfits as outright competitors, Google has been trying to persuade them to let it help them find audiences and sell ads. Some media powers have signed up. But the prospect of a world organized on Google's terms remains unsettling to executives accustomed to controlling the path their products take to consumers. "Once, we had a very simple distribution model, our own branded store," Mark Thompson, director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), told me. Now "we've got to get used to an environment where people access our content in a variety of different ways." Thompson sees this as an opportunity--the BBC signed a deal in early March to set up three new "channels" on Google's YouTube site to show short video clips from its programs and share in the ad revenue YouTube generates. "One of the things no media organization can do now is cancel the future," he said.
Q: 試翻 "Rather than take on ... sell ads."Q: 試翻 "But the prospect ... take to consumers."

2. But will YouTube and sites like it ever deliver media companies the sort of return on content that they're accustomed to? Google's big stroke of moneymaking genius was to sell ads linked to its search results and sell them to anybody. With five minutes and a credit card, you can sign up to bid on a search phrase--cream cheese, say--and pay Google only if people actually click through to your site. Google has since extended this advertising network to other sites, so your ads might show up next to a food blogger's post about bagels as well. For small advertisers and publishers, Google's automated advertising network is a boon: a new, cost-effective way to connect with one another and with customers. But big media companies had already established connections before Google came along, and so far the amounts of money Google offers content producers are paltry compared with what gets thrown around in traditional media. This is especially true with online video, where nobody has really figured out how to match ads to content. YouTube, which Google purchased for $1.65 billion in October, took in just $15 million in revenue last year--less than the cost of making two episodes of the BBC/HBO drama Rome.
Q: 試翻 "But big media ... in traditional media."