Behavioral surplus from targeted advertising drove nearly all Google revenue by 2016
Evidence
Behavioral surplus defines Google’s earnings success. In 2016, 89 percent of the revenues of its parent company, Alphabet, derived from Google’s targeted advertising programs. The scale of raw-material flows is reflected in Google’s domination of the internet, processing over 40,000 search queries every second on average: more than 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide in 2017. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 294
Categorization
- XREF: Concretely quantities the behavioral-surplus extraction that Chapter One theorized; links to later chapters on scale economics. — connects to: Google’s data shifted from improving services to generating ad revenue — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 52; Advertising supplied nearly ninety percent of Google’s revenue in 2016. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1879; Google’s behavioral surplus became a zero-cost asset diverted to market exchange — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 255 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Google’s ad-ranking innovation operationalized behavioral surplus as its core asset
#corroborates(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 239 - Google’s auctions actually traded derivatives of behavioral surplus
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 259 - Google’s search ads sold only intent-rich moments rather than mass attention
#qualifies(0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 889