TheStreet.com TV Recap: Is Google the Ultimate Web Winner?

Even though CEO Dick Parsons did a great job saving Time Warner (TWX), in the end it seems to be falling prey to the fact that anything that is advertising supported is now in question, even if it's online, Jim Cramer said on TheStreet.com TV's Wall St. Confidential Web video Monday.

There's a belief, he said, that the advertising community doesn't know where to go other than Google (GOOG). Cramer believes AOL is a very valuable property. "There are many people who go to it, its instant messaging is still very good and it's still on many people's home page," he said. "It's a tremendous driver of traffic."

He also believes cable's really terrific, Cramer said. "It's a great cash cow." On a side note, Comcast (CMCSA) is down as much as AOL, so the decline, he said, is not specific to Time Warner.

That said, it seems people do not want to own media properties, whether they're online or offline, Cramer continued. Google is the same price it was a year ago, and Yahoo! (YHOO) is down substantially.

"It is a recognition that the companies have been unable to create a belief that their earnings are going to be sustained simply because the real clients at the advertisers don't seem to know where to go," he explained. "Everyone always believed that the Internet companies could technologically challenge print, which turned out to be very right, and everybody always believed that cable could not be technologically challenged.

"I think what's happening now is cable is being challenged by Verizon (VZ) and I think that the Internet is being challenged by other versions of the Internet" and by a notion that Google is so powerful that it can do whatever it wants," Cramer said.

While he always felt there would be four or five winners on the Web, now he's only sure that there will one winner, which is Google, he said. "I always thought that cable was a fantastic business, but now because of Verizon I'm not so sure," Cramer went on. "So my own view reflects the market's indecisions about these stocks."

>To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints