AdWords’ success drove Google to surveil the entire web via AdSense

Evidence

AdWords quickly became so successful that it inspired significant expansion of the surveillance logic. Advertisers demanded more clicks. The answer was to extend the model beyond Google’s search pages and convert the entire internet into a canvas for Google’s targeted ads. This required turning Google’s newfound skills at “data extraction and analysis,” as Hal Varian put it, toward the content of any web page or user action by employing Google’s rapidly expanding semantic analysis and artificial intelligence capabilities to efficiently “squeeze” meaning from them. Only then could Google accurately assess the content of a page and how users interact with that content. This “content-targeted advertising” based on Google’s patented methods was eventually named AdSense. By 2004, AdSense had achieved a run rate of a million dollars per day, and by 2010, it produced annual revenues of more than $10 billion. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 261

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the demand-side ‘advertisers demanded more clicks’ mechanism as the original engine of total-web surveillance — a corrective to tech-determinist tellings.