Facebook opened up to all users earlier this year, opened up to developers in May, and in October Microsoft invested a few hundred million (staking Facebook’s total value at about $15 billion).

This considered the ‘value’ of each of Facebook’s 50 million users at $300 – compared to $500 a year for newspaper readers, according to the Deutsche Bank.

Other 2007 trends included the overpowering growth of Google and diminished role of Yahoo, the end of the paywall model (The New York Times got rid of TimesSelect, WSJ.com could go free and FT.com opened up 30 stories per month), as well as the explosion of widgets.

According to some calculations, Google now has a 40% market share of online advertising. “So the constant calculation in media minds is whether Google is friend or enemy - as if there's really a choice,” says Jarvis.

Belgian newspapers won a suit against Google News, but in May they signed a new deal that allowed Google to use their headlines. In August, Google also struck a deal with major news agencies to carry their wire content on Google News – unfortunately for newspapers for whom wire content represented traffic.

“This may have been Facebook's year. But so far, it is still Google's century,” says Jarvis.

Source: Guardian