AOL grew advertising revenue to $2 billion partly via a scheme called Project Confidence

Evidence

Nonetheless, despite resistance, over the late 1990s Pittman and Berlow managed to transform AOL’s business model; from a standing start, they brought it to nearly $2 billion in annual advertising revenue (one third of AOL’s total) by 2000. But if that revenue growth was staggering, it was carefully planned to seem that way, the result of an internal scheme named “Project Confidence” whose principal goal was to validate the theory that the real value of AOL lay in advertising potential. We have noted that the path of the attention merchants is risky, for it can call for compromises in quality and ethics. AOL, over a five-year period, would demonstrate that fact in a manner rarely equaled over such a short span. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 729

Categorization

• QUESTION: Project Confidence is named but not yet explained - what exactly did it fabricate or engineer? Worth tracking through following pages.
• XREF: connects to: AOL overtook both rivals by rejecting censorship and the ad-based model — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 722; AOL fraudulently inflated advertising revenue through accounting schemes — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 738

Broader Connections

• AOL fraudulently inflated advertising revenue through accounting schemes #qualifies (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 738