Google’s behavioral surplus exploitation produced a 3,590 percent revenue surge in four years

Evidence

Google brought new life to these practices. As had occurred at Ford a century earlier, the company’s engineers and scientists were the first to conduct the entire commercial surveillance symphony, integrating a wide range of mechanisms from cookies to proprietary analytics and algorithmic software capabilities in a sweeping new logic that enshrined surveillance and the unilateral expropriation of behavioral data as the basis for a new market form. The impact of this invention was just as dramatic as Ford’s. In 2001, as Google’s new systems to exploit its discovery of behavioral surplus were being tested, net revenues jumped to 86 million (more than a 400 percent increase over 2000), and the company turned its first profit. By 2002, the cash began to flow and has never stopped, definitive evidence that behavioral surplus combined with Google’s proprietary analytics were sending arrows to their marks. Revenues leapt to 347 million in 2002, then 1.5 billion in 2003, and 3.5 billion in 2004, the year the company went public. The discovery of behavioral surplus had produced a stunning 3,590 percent increase in revenue in less than four years. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 273

Categorization

• XREF: The Ford parallel anchors the recurring industrial analogies the book has been building since earlier chapters on Ford and mass production. — connects to: Behavioral surplus from targeted advertising drove nearly all Google revenue by 2016 — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 294; Behavioral surplus windfalls funded Google’s de facto monopoly in Search — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 277; Google’s behavioral surplus became a zero-cost asset diverted to market exchange — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 255 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Behavioral surplus from targeted advertising drove nearly all Google revenue by 2016 #corroborates (0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 294
• Behavioral surplus windfalls funded Google’s de facto monopoly in Search #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 277
• Google’s ad-ranking innovation operationalized behavioral surplus as its core asset #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 239
• Google’s behavioral surplus became a zero-cost asset diverted to market exchange #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 255