Google’s ad-ranking innovation operationalized behavioral surplus as its core asset

Evidence

Rival search startup Overture had developed an online auction system for web page placement that allowed it to scale online advertising targeted to keywords. Google would produce a transformational enhancement to that model, one that was destined to alter the course of information capitalism. As a Bloomberg journalist explained in 2006, “Google maximizes the revenue it gets from that precious real estate by giving its best position to the advertiser who is likely to pay Google the most in total, based on the price per click multiplied by Google’s estimate of the likelihood that someone will actually click on the ad.” That pivotal multiplier was the result of Google’s advanced computational capabilities trained on its most significant and secret discovery: behavioral surplus. From this point forward, the combination of ever-increasing machine intelligence and ever-more-vast supplies of behavioral surplus would become the foundation of an unprecedented logic of accumulation. Google’s reinvestment priorities would shift from merely improving its user offerings to inventing and institutionalizing the most far-reaching and technologically advanced raw-material supply operations that the world had ever seen. Henceforth, revenues and growth would depend upon more behavioral surplus. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 239

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the pivotal moment where behavioral surplus is operationalized: click-prediction multiplier as the concrete mechanism by which surplus becomes revenue.
• XREF: Connects to traditional capitalism’s raw-material supply logic; Zuboff is explicitly drawing the parallel that underlies her argument that surveillance capitalism is capitalism proper. — connects to: Google dominates the infrastructure behind hidden app connections to behavioral surplus markets. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2013; Google’s early ad-matching patents replaced guesswork with predictive behavioral data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 245; Google’s behavioral surplus became a zero-cost asset diverted to market exchange — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 255 (+10 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the trees-as-infrastructure piece insofar as both concern turning a natural/behavioral resource into extractable infrastructure — the shift from user offerings to raw-material supply operations is a direct industrial metaphor.

Broader Connections

• Google’s quality-score system tied ad placement to measured clicks #expands (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 890
• Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24