Somewhere in the cacophony of the usual stuff on TechmemeCrunchFeed this past week, I missed this interesting nugget of news:

Google News makes money.  Lots of it.  To the tune of $100 million fungolas.

Now, when I heard about this, I did the proverbial triple take (“… wait, wait, wait — WHAT?”).

I’ve been a big fan of Google News.  I’m sorry to see that its commenting feature never really took off, but I attribute that more to Google News not really being as aggressive as it could be in the marketing department; but then again, that’s probably never been their strong suit (in some ways, they’re kind of like Starbucks, relying on their brand strength, and not really any particular message, nor any specific marketing campaign{ing})

But all that aside, one of the biggest issues that we were all yakking about a year ago, was how many traditional publications (read: newspapers) were complaining of how Google News was siphoning off readers.  And that Google Commenting would make that worse.  Some new media watchers (read: me, Mathew ingram, Scott karp, and others) liked the idea, and were pointed in the fact that Google News ought to be viewed as yet another source of traffic, and more importantly, has *NO* ads, and makes no direct money off Google News.

Well, I guess we were wrong about that one.

There are lots of sides to this tidbit of news, but one that hasn’t seemed to have gotten *any* traction is the legal one.

I’m referring to, specifically, the sabre rattling that Sam Zell made about a year ago when he purchased Tribune, and the threats he was making against Google at the time — that Google is liable for lost traffic to newspaper and traditional media sites, as it acts as a aggregator for news.  Lost traffic is lost money, and with this loose slip of the tongue, Google has revealed how much its making “at the expense” of the traditional sites that the are pointing to.

I put “at the expense” in quotes, naturally, because I think this issue is a little more complicated than a zero-sum scenario: Google doesn’t necessarily gain at the expense of other sites via Google News; rather, I suspect that the $100M figure comes from monetizing “left over” traffic who are either a) unsatisified by the news they findin Google News, or b) made more curious by the stuff they *do* find in Google News, as they head over to the “search” button to find more stuff.

It seems like the “death of newspapers” meme has dried up for a while, but with this casual slip of the tongue, one does wonder if it has just given some ammunition — and justification (however ill-defined) — that traditional media may have been looking for a long time.