"It needs to be said that Google and Facebook are perfect, no-brainer advertising platforms." Hindsight! When Google came to being, search engines were not so

"It needs to be said that Google and Facebook are perfect, no-brainer advertising platforms." Hindsight! When Google came to being, search engines were not so obvious. They relied on banner ads (declining CPMs). Overture was experimenting with the PPC model, but it wasn't remotely mainstream. Facebook as well. Many people claimed that Facebook could never turn a profit with advertising. Users had no purchasing intent, suffered from ad blindness, etc. To some degree, they were right-- clickthru rates on FB are pretty awful-- but with 700M+ active users, it really doesn't matter. It was decidedly non-obvious that Facebook would be a gaming platform.