Even if your business model were focused on CPM advertising, how would you attract new or ‘potential’ customers via the Internet while narrowing your e-marketing strategy towards a very small chunk of your demographic.

Actually costs of the bytes and packets being sent is minimal overall and getting cheaper by the month.

But the point that you’re missing is that under some business models this doesn’t matter one iota. In fact, it can be *great* if your rivals take that traffic.

Traffic is a direct cost, but brings you no direct revenue unless you’re selling content. If you rely on advertising, it is only an opportunity for revenue, not revenue on its own.

If the traffic that Google sends is low-value traffic, ie it either doesn’t click on your ads or isn’t a valuable audience for selling CPM ads, then it will cost you more money than you’ll make from it.

So is this the case with traffic from Google to, say, the NYT? I don’t know – and without some deep analysis of the traffic and its behaviour, you can’t tell. Murdoch has that data. Neither you nor I do.

Chasing after traffic without being able to monetize it is a charter to lose money. The point may be about to come when it makes perfect business sense for some publications to say “thanks, but no thanks” to Google.