Google’s data shifted from improving services to generating ad revenue

Evidence

In the wake of the dot-com bust, Google increasingly needed a way to generate revenues, yet a fee-based service risked alienating the users who were the basis of its success. Eventually it began to use the search data, along with cookies and other bits of information, to sell targeted ad space to advertisers through an increasingly automated auction system. When the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) market peaked in March 2000, Google unveiled AdWords in October 2000 and began its transformation into a revenue-generating company. The extracted data moved from being a way to improve services to becoming a way to collect advertising revenues. Today Google and Facebook remain almost entirely dependent on them: in the first quarter of 2016, 89.0 per cent of Google’s and 96.6 per cent of Facebook’s revenues came from advertisers. — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Direct counterpoint framing against Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism story of extractive data origins. — connects to: Behavioral data shifted from improving service to reading users’ minds for ad targeting. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 244; Google shifted advertising from matching keywords to targeting individual users — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 231; Early Google reinvested all user behavioral data in improving its own services — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 214 (+4 more)
• ADDENDUM: Complements the trees-as-infrastructure piece: platforms as data-extractive infrastructure with monopolistic tendencies.

Related

• Google shifted advertising from matching keywords to targeting individual users (similarity 0.87)
• Advertising platforms sell analysed targeting promises, not raw data (similarity 0.86)
• Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers (similarity 0.85)
• Google’s search ads sold only intent-rich moments rather than mass attention (similarity 0.84)
• Behavioral surplus from targeted advertising drove nearly all Google revenue by 2016 (similarity 0.83)
• Advertising supplied nearly ninety percent of Google’s revenue in 2016. (similarity 0.83)
• Behavioral data shifted from improving service to reading users’ minds for ad targeting. (similarity 0.82)
• Google’s early ad-matching patents replaced guesswork with predictive behavioral data (similarity 0.82)
• Surveillance platforms extract behavioral data from users and sell predictions to advertisers (similarity 0.81)
• Google and Facebook captured nearly all growth in global ad spending by 2016 (similarity 0.81)
• Network effects embed monopoly tendencies directly into platform structure (similarity 0.81)
• Early Google reinvested all user behavioral data in improving its own services (similarity 0.80)
• Google’s ad-ranking innovation operationalized behavioral surplus as its core asset (similarity 0.80)
• Google frames users’ unpaid data contributions as an investment in personalized services. (similarity 0.80)
• Google’s behavioral surplus became a zero-cost asset diverted to market exchange (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Behavioral data shifted from improving service to reading users’ minds for ad targeting. #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 244
• Behavioral surplus from targeted advertising drove nearly all Google revenue by 2016 #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 294
• Google shifted advertising from matching keywords to targeting individual users #corroborates (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 231
• Early Google reinvested all user behavioral data in improving its own services #qualifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 214
• Advertising shifted from selling product qualities to selling user identity #expands (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 550
• Google’s search ads sold only intent-rich moments rather than mass attention #qualifies (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 889
• Platform profit comes from commodifying user data by-products rather than selling ads #corroborates (0.72) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 40