Investor pressure forced Google and Facebook to intensify advertising against their original ideals.

Evidence

In this game of trackers and profile builders, as in so many others, Google and Facebook, de facto diarchs of the online attention merchants, reigned supreme. By design, both firms had acquired the best data on just about every consumer on earth, as well as possessing the best tools for collecting more of it, which by the 2010s both were prepared to exploit as far as possible. Never mind that each had originally been hesitant even to allow advertising to pollute its pages or interfere with the user experience. That was then. Since those years of initial hand-wringing, as investors and Wall Street demanded their quarterly increases in revenue, there was little choice but to turn up the heat, intensifying the reach of ads while hoping that their respective market positions were secure enough to prevent too many users from bolting. The essential bind of the attention merchant began tightening even on those Faustian geniuses who thought they had beaten the Devil. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1086

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the recurring attention-merchant bind developed across earlier chapters, where exploitation of attention escalates under competitive or investor pressure. — connects to: Disinformation thrived on Google and Facebook because it served their revenue imperatives. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1612; Investor panic pressured Google toward profit despite its search dominance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 225; Early internet programmers and even CEOs resisted advertising on principle as intrusive — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 728 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Google’s dual-class share structure insulated founders from market and investor pressures #complicates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 322