Justin Fox, Columnist

Google May Employ More People Than the Entire U.S. Newspaper Industry

Another milestone has been passed (sort of) in the supplanting of legacy media. There are some problems with that.

February 12, 2019 at 5:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Times have changed.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

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Alphabet Inc., which is almost entirely Google, had 98,771 employees as of December. That news, contained in the annual 10-K report the company released last week, got me thinking. Google, you may remember, passed the entire U.S. newspaper industry in advertising revenue in 2010. The numbers are now not even remotely close.

This is not a perfect comparison: Google’s ad revenues are global, while the U.S. newspaper industry’s are not. Still, it’s directionally correct, and pretty telling. So I wondered whether Google/Alphabet was about to do the same on the employment front.2 Formal answer: They’re getting there.