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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

It always tickles my funny bone to see people attempt to tie every Google move to "How do we use this for ads?"

It's the opposite; Google's seeing that their revenue stream is very near a monoculture and they know monocultures can't last forever. A lot of their initiatives (cloud, video, wearables) are trying hard to find an alternate revenue stream that will be as profitable as ads so that when the industry inevitably crashes (not because of anything specific they can predict, but because all industries eventually do) they're not powering their entire empire off of a single river that just dried up.

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Sure. Their biggest business outside of search is YouTube. But that doesnt make much money on subscriptions, its ads...

With Premium and TV, they are making a big push to change the YouTube revenue model away from as dependence.

Don't forget gaming. They're going after the Twitch business model there. Combining that with traditional YouTube and Stadia offers a very robust social gaming platform. They're basically going after digital entertainment all across the board, looking for opportunities to leverage cloud/ai to leapfrog encumbants.

Yep. The goal they're targeting is a huge uphill battle for them. Margins on ads are so good, there's almost nothing that competes.

I wish I could say that it caused me humor every time I come across this type of justification for the ever-quickening erosion of the concept of personal privacy in the era of big tech. Here's why my gut reaction to interpreting Google's behaviors starts from the core assumption that they are pursing ever-greater levels of privacy-eroding ad tech in nearly everything they do:

0) Google's only purpose is to make money.

1) Google's strongest strategy (by orders of magnitude) for making money is targeted advertising.

2) Google has surpassed the critical size threshold beyond which morality plays no role in business decisions (see surveillance state-supporting tech in China among other issues).

Due to these facts it appears inevitable that Google will seek in all of its large-scale actions to involve ad tech in whatever it produces or engages in. It's how they fulfill their purpose (selling the most sophisticated targeted advertising possible).

That's what I'm saying. Targeted advertising isn't guaranteed to satisfy rule 0. The industry is under threat from multiple sources, and more importantly, no single industry ever goes forever without encountering a storm.

A naive approach would be to hyper-optimize on ad targeting to pursue rule 0, but Google does its best to not be naive. The company's ownership model is designed to target the long game, which is what they seem to tend to do in their decisionmaking much of the time.

That isn't to say that advertising doesn't factor in or that they definitely won't ever use biometrics for ad data, merely that "We could use this for ads" probably doesn't by itself justify buying Fitbit. But potentially uses in advertising and Assistant might.

How can advertisements ever die in a capitalist society? Anyone who wants to sell anything buys ads. That's how the cycle works.

Sure, they can morph into different mediums and appear in different contexts, but that doesn't make them "not ads."

Agreed; advertising can be regulated but doesn't go away.

Online ads specifically have enjoyed premium value over even "traditional" print and television ads because of highly-specific microtargeting; there's a combination of demographic data and ad targeting that an online service can use to offer expectations that you're paying specifically for the high-value slice of people you want to reach. It's an expectation that print and TV (being wide-cast, non-customized experiences) have difficulty offering.

Various phenomena (market regulation, the Facebook / Twitter data walled gardens, the proliferation of ad- and script-blockers) threaten the guarantees that online advertising has been able to make, and it's unclear that Google's high-cost-of-operation empire survives unscathed if money flows away from premium online ads (either by advertisers going to alternate channels or by advertisers saying "Your value-add claims are bunk and I'm not going to pay for them").

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