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Unpopular opinion but this sounds like a half baked idea that will never amount to anything. Imagine some other equally silly parallels: We generate money by s

by whack 6y ago

Unpopular opinion but this sounds like a half baked idea that will never amount to anything. Imagine some other equally silly parallels: We generate money by selling iOS apps on a network of hidden developers. With this money we automatically buy Apple shares. We buy Apple via their own app store! Apple eats itself - but in the end "we" own it! We generate money by selling goods on Amazon on a network of hidden affiliates. With our profits we automatically buy Amazon shares. We buy Amazon via their own marketplace! Amazon eats itself - but in the end "we" own it! If your goal is to takeover a public company, just start a GoFundMe and let people donate money to you using any source they want. That is a far better way of achieving your goal, as compared to accepting "donations" only via AdSense. Though I suppose that is far less "hip", so it'll never catch on.

appleflaxen 6y ago
I read the OP as a tongue in cheek thought experiment (or satire), rather than a sincere effort to subvert, cripple and destroy a multibillion dollar company by running advertisements inside their platform. As a result, I suspect that a "half-baked idea that will never amount to anything" was the author's intenion, and that your opinion probably is no more unpopular than those who doubt the chicken really wanted to get to the other side.
- tedunangst 6y ago
  It's the kind of project that others do take seriously though. Like the self driving car that was "unable to escape a salt circle". The artist just parked the car and drew a circle around it. No effort was made to escape. Yet everyone reacted to it like "those engineers think they're so smart but they were tricked by a simple artist."
- whack 6y ago
  Based on everything I've read, it isn't an idle thought experiment at all. The artists are genuinely trying to take down Google. Check out the press links: https://www.theregister.com/2008/08/13/google_will_eat_itself/ https://www.theregister.com/2008/08/13/google_will_eat_itsel... Reading more, it actually gets even worse. Apparently the artists were using a bunch of click bots to inflate their ad revenue, and they were boasting about gaming Google's anti-fraud systems to do so.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    This reminds of the Spotify thread where posters were desperately failing to comprehend what it means for a musician to be an artist.
    - whack 6y ago
      I'm not familiar with that thread. Care to elaborate?
ErikAugust 6y ago
They don't need a GoFundMe considering they have made millions of dollars doing this "half baked idea".
Bjorkbat 6y ago
I don't think it's intended to actually subvert Google. It's simply interesting. It's one thing to speculate on taking over a company through unconventional means, but gradually chipping away at a company using the very thing that powers it is pretty interesting. It's hard to imagine doing that in 2005, even harder to imagine doing it now. Doesn't help that online ads have a certain arcane quality about them. It's crazy that you can make money from a blog just by creating an AdSense account.
- notahacker 6y ago
  > gradually chipping away at a company using the very thing that powers it is pretty interesting. It's hard to imagine doing that in 2005, even harder to imagine doing it now. Most tech companies have pretty good defences against that sort of thing. High gross margins mean when your involvement increases sales on their platform, their P&L figures look a lot better. High P/E ratios mean every time their P&L figures look unexpectedly better, the value of all the stock you haven't bought jumps by a lot more. Then again if you yourself are a fashionable web company, maybe it's different, especially if you buy more shares in the platform company you're dependent on by selling off your own stock. Wonder how much of Facebook Zynga could have bought when it was supplying 19% of Facebook's revenue....
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I think it needs an extra layer to make the plan more recursive. "We use our AdSense revenue on a secret network of sites, 80% of which goes to buy stock in Google, the other 20% goes towards buy Gcp cloud compute that runs a network of bots that are browsing and clicking our ads this generating higher and higher ad revenues to reinvest" Now if you could make that work, Google really would eat itself.
BbzzbB 6y ago
I mean, AAPL is a bad example as it's not far from the truth [0], except it's the iPhone that's financing it not the App Store. [0]https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/shares-outstanding https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/shares-...
StavrosK 6y ago
This is an art project.
shadowgovt 6y ago
It completely ignores the fact that a controlling interest in the company is held in shares that are, in the short-term, practically unbuyable (i.e. Larry and Sergey Brin aren't in the market to sell, period).
mdip 6y ago
I'm not sure it's so unpopular of an opinion; at least, it's shared by me. Your "silly parallels" make great points. In the "app store" analogy, it's not "apple eating itself", it's developers donating time to create apps who's profits are then used to purchase Apple. So it's a network of volunteer developers eating Apple[0], not "Apple eating itself". In the case of GWEI, it's a network of blogs who are hosting the adsense code that is funding this project. I'd imagine the equivalent is "the developers of whatever is on these sites[1]" are, again, donating their time to purchase shares of Google. After all is done, you can apparently provide your contact information and a portion of the shares collected will be distributed to you[2] but that feature is disabled. Change it up a little bit and instead give the shares to the creators of the sites gaming the system. Now the developers aren't donating their time, they're working in a business and investing all of the profits in the company that's paying them (in delusional hope that they'll somehow be able to purchase all of the shares). That's a whole lot more boring, and adding "delusional/somehow" was likely unnecessary. At the end of the day it's people doing (probably a substantial amount of) work to earn money, it's not a magical "self-powering" system (as Google Will Eat Itself implies). Either way, if the site creators' purpose (or one of their purposes) was to provoke thought as a functional "art piece", it's very cool (sincerely). If it was to make a point of some kind, it's lost on me. If it was to actually own all of Google, this way ... well, good luck with that? [0] I didn't see that coming when I wrote that sentence; no pun intended. [1] Guessing the "network of sites" is landing pages or similar bunk that starts around page 3 of any sufficiently rare search term. Perhaps it's written up on the site and I didn't dig far enough. [2] I'm not terribly clear on how that is supposed to work.
jdtang13 6y ago
It's clearly art lol
29athrowaway 6y ago
Wrong. Conceptually, their aim was to use bots to generate traffic that results in ad revenue and then use that revenue to buy Google shares. Google has technology that detects these patterns and flags them, and the ad revenue from flagged traffic is not paid.

by whack 6y ago

appleflaxen 6y ago

I read the OP as a tongue in cheek thought experiment (or satire), rather than a sincere effort to subvert, cripple and destroy a multibillion dollar company by running advertisements inside their platform. As a result, I suspect that a "half-baked idea that will never amount to anything" was the author's intenion, and that your opinion probably is no more unpopular than those who doubt the chicken really wanted to get to the other side.

tedunangst 6y ago
It's the kind of project that others do take seriously though. Like the self driving car that was "unable to escape a salt circle". The artist just parked the car and drew a circle around it. No effort was made to escape. Yet everyone reacted to it like "those engineers think they're so smart but they were tricked by a simple artist."
whack 6y ago
Based on everything I've read, it isn't an idle thought experiment at all. The artists are genuinely trying to take down Google. Check out the press links: https://www.theregister.com/2008/08/13/google_will_eat_itself/ https://www.theregister.com/2008/08/13/google_will_eat_itsel... Reading more, it actually gets even worse. Apparently the artists were using a bunch of click bots to inflate their ad revenue, and they were boasting about gaming Google's anti-fraud systems to do so.
- sukilot 6y ago
  This reminds of the Spotify thread where posters were desperately failing to comprehend what it means for a musician to be an artist.
  - whack 6y ago
    I'm not familiar with that thread. Care to elaborate?

ErikAugust 6y ago

They don't need a GoFundMe considering they have made millions of dollars doing this "half baked idea".

Bjorkbat 6y ago

I don't think it's intended to actually subvert Google. It's simply interesting. It's one thing to speculate on taking over a company through unconventional means, but gradually chipping away at a company using the very thing that powers it is pretty interesting. It's hard to imagine doing that in 2005, even harder to imagine doing it now. Doesn't help that online ads have a certain arcane quality about them. It's crazy that you can make money from a blog just by creating an AdSense account.

notahacker 6y ago
> gradually chipping away at a company using the very thing that powers it is pretty interesting. It's hard to imagine doing that in 2005, even harder to imagine doing it now. Most tech companies have pretty good defences against that sort of thing. High gross margins mean when your involvement increases sales on their platform, their P&L figures look a lot better. High P/E ratios mean every time their P&L figures look unexpectedly better, the value of all the stock you haven't bought jumps by a lot more. Then again if you yourself are a fashionable web company, maybe it's different, especially if you buy more shares in the platform company you're dependent on by selling off your own stock. Wonder how much of Facebook Zynga could have bought when it was supplying 19% of Facebook's revenue....
jjeaff 6y ago
I think it needs an extra layer to make the plan more recursive. "We use our AdSense revenue on a secret network of sites, 80% of which goes to buy stock in Google, the other 20% goes towards buy Gcp cloud compute that runs a network of bots that are browsing and clicking our ads this generating higher and higher ad revenues to reinvest" Now if you could make that work, Google really would eat itself.

BbzzbB 6y ago

I mean, AAPL is a bad example as it's not far from the truth [0], except it's the iPhone that's financing it not the App Store. [0]https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/shares-outstanding https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/shares-...

StavrosK 6y ago

This is an art project.

shadowgovt 6y ago

It completely ignores the fact that a controlling interest in the company is held in shares that are, in the short-term, practically unbuyable (i.e. Larry and Sergey Brin aren't in the market to sell, period).

mdip 6y ago

I'm not sure it's so unpopular of an opinion; at least, it's shared by me. Your "silly parallels" make great points. In the "app store" analogy, it's not "apple eating itself", it's developers donating time to create apps who's profits are then used to purchase Apple. So it's a network of volunteer developers eating Apple[0], not "Apple eating itself". In the case of GWEI, it's a network of blogs who are hosting the adsense code that is funding this project. I'd imagine the equivalent is "the developers of whatever is on these sites[1]" are, again, donating their time to purchase shares of Google. After all is done, you can apparently provide your contact information and a portion of the shares collected will be distributed to you[2] but that feature is disabled. Change it up a little bit and instead give the shares to the creators of the sites gaming the system. Now the developers aren't donating their time, they're working in a business and investing all of the profits in the company that's paying them (in delusional hope that they'll somehow be able to purchase all of the shares). That's a whole lot more boring, and adding "delusional/somehow" was likely unnecessary. At the end of the day it's people doing (probably a substantial amount of) work to earn money, it's not a magical "self-powering" system (as Google Will Eat Itself implies). Either way, if the site creators' purpose (or one of their purposes) was to provoke thought as a functional "art piece", it's very cool (sincerely). If it was to make a point of some kind, it's lost on me. If it was to actually own all of Google, this way ... well, good luck with that? [0] I didn't see that coming when I wrote that sentence; no pun intended. [1] Guessing the "network of sites" is landing pages or similar bunk that starts around page 3 of any sufficiently rare search term. Perhaps it's written up on the site and I didn't dig far enough. [2] I'm not terribly clear on how that is supposed to work.

jdtang13 6y ago

It's clearly art lol

29athrowaway 6y ago

Wrong. Conceptually, their aim was to use bots to generate traffic that results in ad revenue and then use that revenue to buy Google shares. Google has technology that detects these patterns and flags them, and the ad revenue from flagged traffic is not paid.