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This guy's conception of The Google's role in the history of the ad-based internet is totally out of touch, which is strange because he appears to be about as o

This guy's conception of The Google's role in the history of the ad-based internet is totally out of touch, which is strange because he appears to be about as old as I am, maybe even a bit older than that. The Google didn't prove that "ads could work" to make content free. They may have become a big player, if not the biggest player in the ad space, but the proliferation of ad-supported content had more to do with timing than anything else. YouTube was born at a time where video content embedded in webpages could actually work for most users (without downloading something like RealPlayer) and be scaled up. The Google simply bought this business because it was clear to most people that YouTube represented the future, and they had the cash to do it. Not only did they have that cash, but even more cash to throw at it to create their Buffetean moat. There's nothing genius about it. Before YouTube and even Web 2.0, there was not only plenty of free written content but there were other video sites, few if any had anything to do with The Google. If anything, The Google is responsible for demolishing the ad-based internet. The quality control of their ads used to be so atrocious that of course people started ignoring most of them. Thus, traditional ads became nearly worthless. Their conclusion wasn't to turn away business from outright scams hawking B.S., but that people aren't clicking on ads because the ads aren't relevant to them! A good theory on paper, except it turns out people don't actually like feeling like they're being followed everywhere they go, and it also turns out that when they regularly buy Huggies diapers out of necessity, that doesn't mean they want to immediately see another 100 ads telling them to buy more Huggies. All that said, I don't think ads have very much to do with the current decline in the quality of the web as a whole. The recent push to shove lots of ads in front of users, namely those that appear frequently within YouTube videos, is just a symptom of companies like The Google struggling to maintain growth when Silicon Valley isn't living life on the fast lane in Easy Street. There's also other factors like search engines failing to scale along with the web, as well as deranking or outright censorship; this is done both at the behest of advertisers but also to chase the widest possible audience.

jprete 3y ago
I agree that ads aren’t the cause. In fact I think they’re a downstream result. The root cause is that the Web doesn’t support any currency but attention. People on social media can cash in attention for self-esteem, but serious content can only really trade it for advertising dollars.
tensor 3y ago
Those of us who remember when Google first started might even remember that part of it's early success was precisely that it didn't have tons of banner ads like the search engines that came before it. In no way was it the first to prove that "ads could work", the ad-driven model was already bananas before it came out. It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.

jprete 3y ago

I agree that ads aren’t the cause. In fact I think they’re a downstream result. The root cause is that the Web doesn’t support any currency but attention. People on social media can cash in attention for self-esteem, but serious content can only really trade it for advertising dollars.

tensor 3y ago

Those of us who remember when Google first started might even remember that part of it's early success was precisely that it didn't have tons of banner ads like the search engines that came before it. In no way was it the first to prove that "ads could work", the ad-driven model was already bananas before it came out. It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.