Google’s rise at the expense of traditional media is well-documented, but I thought the conversation would benefit from a graph plotting Google’s stock growth vs the change in paid circulation rates of Newspapers and Magazines.

Sources: Magazine Publishers Association, Newspaper Association of America, Yahoo! Finance

This is by no means meant to be a scientific analysis and I’m not claiming that these are statistically correlated; instead, the graph offers yet another data point confirming that we are indeed living in Google’s world.

And we’re not the only ones saying this: Robin Farzad at Business Week opines against Google’s “too-free press”. Jim Cramer goes a step further by saying Google ” . . . doesn’t create content, it steals it, borrows it, shares it.”

Regardless of where stand on the Google spectrum, you can’t possibly thrive in Google’s world unless you are asking questions like:

• Are you monetizing every copy of your content that appears across the Web
• Which ad networks owe you a cut of the revenue they are making off your content ?
• Is your syndication pricing optimized for the head and the tail?
• Where does your original content rank in Search Engines vs those copying it?
• Which bloggers are most effective in driving traffic back to your site?

How are you going to thrive?