Hacker News Reader

Comment by emtel | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any basis in fact for what you're saying? Because this might be the most wrong top comment I've ever seen on HN. I worked at google for most of the 2000s, and no one was ashamed of the company or how it made money. We didn't even regard ads as a necessary evil, because back then, most of the ads were very clearly non-evil. You can argue that we should have been ashamed if you want, but that's a different matter.

And no, it was not hard to convince people to work for google. Everyone wanted to work at google, and everyone understood exactly how google made money. But, everyone also understood why google was exciting. There was no deception necessary.

View on HN

Yep. Still this way today for the most part. You wouldn't guess it by reading the comments on this site, but there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google. And if people internally have objections to the work, ads never enter into it. Perhaps that's because the comment has fundamentally misunderstood what google is.

See, calling it an ad tech company is overly reductionist. Even though it is technically true, it obscures the overall picture, rather than clarifying. It is rhetoric. It would be as if you called it a bit shifting company because the most proximal event to it making money is the shifting of some bits. The statement is actually even more misleading, because a bunch of folks are by default opposed to advertising, so the point of the rhetoric is to minimize all the other stuff and maximize the unpleasant part by obscuring it with this reduction.

Yes, ads are the proximal cause of Google's wealth. But Google is a consumer services company that makes money via the inclusion of ads on some of those services. Most Googlers do not work on nor are concerned with ads. They work on the services I mentioned. The work is to make the services better so they will attract more users. It is by delivering great services that Google attracts users. Incidentally, these users also enable Google's money making machine by clicking on or viewing ads sometimes.

(To be clear, I am not claiming that the services are universally great, only that that is the aspiration and the end upon which most Googlers' work is focused.)

It's like reducing broadcast TV/radio as "advertising companies". They make their money selling ad time and develop/buy programming to attract viewers and justify the cost of that ad time.

But to everyone else, they're a source of information and entertainment that's available to anyone with an antenna, a tuner, and a speaker/display.

And again, it's not as if broadcast media are universally great, but there's value in them outside of the advertising business.

In many countries, public broadcasters have explicit government funding and a government charter to educate and inform (including an injunction to refrain from promoting vested interests). Thus, they are fundamentally different from commercial broadcasters and Google.

Now, if we had a publicly funded search engine, that might not be a bad idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting

>It's like reducing broadcast TV/radio as "advertising companies". They make their money selling ad time and develop/buy programming to attract viewers and justify the cost of that ad time.

Yes. I would call broadcast TV advertisers. Have you given mass media a critical analysis lately? It’s chalk full of subtle product placement and other brainwash, on top of in-your-face advertisements every few minutes. The Simpsons made fun of this a decade ago, and it seems to have only gotten worse. I limit television exposure just the same as Google exposure.

I speak for myself only of course, but jumping to defend Google with broadcast tv made me laugh.

Didn't intend to "defend" any company or industry really. Just wanted to point out that there are multiple transactions taking place.

Advertiser/ad platform is one of them, but it's not the only one.

Mass media is an interesting choice of example given the recent digital media collapse. There, too, people who were recruited on idealistic visions of “journalism” are being forced by their bosses to reckon with the fact that their job is not to report stories they consider important, but to create content that turns a profit on ad revenue.

The analogy works in other cases, though.

Local newspapers are pretty much exactly "advertising companies", with advertising making up two thirds or more of each printed page, and no real care given to the journalism side of things.

Given that there clearly are "advertising companies" (or "users-as-product" companies) masquerading as user-serving companies, it might be sensible to talk about a spectrum between user-serving and user-as-product, and where companies fall on this spectrum. You can be, say, 30% a user-serving company, and 70% a user-as-product company. You could also trend in one direction or the other over time.

I would absolutely put broadcast media in the bucket of advertising companies. For any given hour of TV you're lucky to get 30 minutes of content that is free from advertising (includes product placement), it's probably even worse at this point for terrestrial radio.

Hence why the switch to netflix, spotify, hulu etc... has been such a disruptor.

At this point their "users" are really more like unpaid laborers. The only entities I would really consider "google customers" would be the individuals and organizations which advertise through them, and the folks who pay to use their APIs.

This kind of dishonesty is exactly what I'm talking about. Users are compensated for viewing the ads in the form of services that Google delivers to them. If it were not so, people would quickly stop using the site. There is no reasonable similarity between Google users and unpaid laborers. I really don't feel like the discourse is served by you making inflammatory remarks like this.

I dont think the discourse is served by regurgitating the rhetoric from google's pr think tank. I'm going to have a look at their quarterly reports when I have time later. They're legally required to tell the truth to their shareholders, so that information is at least true enough to comply with regulations.

Yeah plus Bing basically pays people to search on them, so if you don't feel like Google is giving you enough value for the amount of ads on it, you can go over to Microsoft Rewards and get some gift cards while you search.

Dishonest!? You base this on the assumption of ubiquitous use of Google products. I don’t elect to use Google products, but I still am subject to Google ads and adtech.

You are subject to the ads chosen by the websites you use. You are compensated in the form of the service of those sites. Google is just incidentally the ad provider the websites you visit choose to use. All assuming you don't block of course. The comparison to unpaid labor is still unapt. Unless you are gaining no value from these sites that are showing you ads? If so then why do you keep visiting them?

I’m tracked around the web against my will. I cant tell Google to stop, I can only try and prevent/corrupt their attempts. That’s despicable behavior.

Now you're complaining about a different thing. A thing which I'm not even sure happens. I know for a fact you can disable ads personalization, which should eliminate all incentives for google to track you, in the event that they were doing so before.

As to the rest, people have different views on the ethics of these kinds of voluntary interactions.

> Yes, ads are the proximal cause of Google's wealth. But Google is a consumer services company that makes money via the inclusion of ads on some of those services.

How do adsense and doubleclick fit in this explanation?

I didn't mean to be exhaustive when I said consumer services, but rather to describe the bulk of the work. That is not the whole extent of their business. For example Google Cloud is largely B2B. As you rightly pointed out, there is a significant amount of B2B adtech that gets done at Google. Google/Alphabet also appears to have or have had aspirations to be a power company, a taxi company, and a logistics company, among other things.

Aspirations are great! We should all have aspirations.

> As you rightly pointed out, there is a significant amount of B2B adtech that gets done at Google

B2B adtech is the overwhelming source of revenue. The consumer services you mention exist either a) to entrench the ad business by commoditizing its complements, or b) as a side-effect of Google’s strategy to secure all the best R&D talent even if it means inventing fun projects to keep them busy.

Neither of those things make Google a consumer services business that happens to sell ads. It makes Google the largest ad business in history, which happens to build free consumer products as a means to protecting and expanding its business.

Google Cloud or Waymo could, perhaps one day, become a source of revenue large enough to truly change the nature of Google’s business. But at this time their revenue is not large enough, and Google’s leadership has not shown the desire to shift their strategic focus decisively.

> B2B adtech is the overwhelming source of revenue.

This is wrong and therefore all conclusions based on it, most of their ad revenue comes from ads on their own services, most notably search. B2B adsence is a big chunk of money but it is not their main business.

By "B2B adtech" I mean "sells ads to businesses". This includes not just adsense, but adwords as well. Whether the ad is served on Google's sites or elsewhere, it's a business paying for it.

Not that this semantic point makes any difference either way. Google is an ad business that happens to make consumer products.

> The work is to make the services better so they will attract more users. It is by delivering great services that Google attracts users.

This is less and less true. These last few years we have seen aggressive monetization push on most popular Google products, at the expense of product quality: search, maps and Youtube have all seen a significant increase of advertising that degrades the core product value. Mobile search & maps in particular have implemented deceptive techniques that make sponsored ads look like "native" results.

Try typing "car insurance in San Francisco" and tell me how many times you can see the little "ad" logo... Getting tinier and tinier by the day. Remember when sponsored search results used to have a blue background color?

The Maps app is also barely useable anymore because of how bloated it is. I have a basic Nexus phone from 2 years ago, and it takes ~10 seconds to fully load (!)

> Try typing "car insurance in San Francisco"

It refused to show me any ads at all. Perhaps because I live in a different locale. I did "Car insurance in <my city>". There were two ads below the fold. Everything above the fold was organic -- local insurance agencies and web links to the usual suspects (Esurance, etc.). I live in a large East Coast city for what it's worth.

For me from my laptop: 4 above the fold, 3 below the fold. Each ad also has more pixels of real-estate than an "organic" search result. More than 70% of the pixels I see on my screen before scrolling belong to ads!

I got 4 ads, 3 were Progressive, Geico, and AAA. Those are likely to be top results for car insurance even without the ads.

> there are no shortage of folks who would love to come work for Google

I think this is largely because of brand cachet and good pay. How many people would take a serious paycut to work for Google? I'm sure there are some, but I doubt there are many. And amongst those I bet a non-trivial amount would just be in it for the perks (free food, busses to work, childcare, etcetera).

I obviously have no way of verifying this, but amongst my circle of friends (not representative of the general population at all) most people no longer want to work for Google. It's more than just talk - I just turned down a job offer from Google recently.

There's no doubt that good pay has always been part of the appeal. I don't know if there was ever a time when Google was offering below market average pay, so it's going to be hard to separate the attractiveness of the culture from the attractiveness of the comp, perks, and benefits. FWIW, when I joined in the mid 2000s, I felt like most people were coming because of the compensation and career growth potential. Free food was obviously a plus, but that's not why I picked it over Microsoft.

There are a couple of things that make your claim about Google being a "consumer services company" fall apart in my view:

1. The only parts that make money are the ads. You characterize it as "great services" that "incidentally" make money via ads. Incidental means an "unpredictable or minor consequence." A more fair characterization in my opinion would be that it is an advertising company that uses consumer-targeted services to create space for its advertising market. The advertising is in no way "incidental," it is integral.

2. They have notoriously poor support for their "consumer services." If they were really a consumer services company at heart you would expect that supporting the consumers who use their services would be important to them. But it's clearly not.

Advertising is not only proximal, it is causative. Google functions very differently than a traditional consumer services company. Saying that it's because they're "innovative" or "disruptive" is obscuring the fact that the reason they can operate so non-traditionally is because they do not face the same constraints and pressures that a traditional consumer services company faces because they are not a traditional consumer services company which makes money from their consumer services. They are an advertising company which uses their consumer services as a vehicle for their actual money-making product: advertising.

If nobody was truly ashamed then it's because they probably weren't paying attention to the shadier sides of your business. One example was back in the 2000's, google knowingly profited from online pharmacies that sold controlled substances to US citizens illegally[1].

1 - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g...

I don't think that many Google employees would be heartbroken over facilitating the disruption of the fundamentally broken US healthcare system by making it easier for people to buy lifesaving medications without hideous markup by the middlemen. Especially when they are just letting people buy same drugs from right across the border at a reasonable price thanks to a functional socialized healthcare system.

People in Canada can't goto the pharmacy and pick up as much oxycontin as they would like whenever they feel like it. The majority of the drugs being marketed by those pharmacies were narcotics, not insulin. I agree that the US Healthcare system is insanely broken and kills people, but pretending like those pill mills were just a bunch of honest dudes helping down trodden Americans is a fucking joke.

> no one _was ashamed_ of the company or how it made money.

do you think the sentiment has changed since?

last time when the occulus VR targeted ads news broke, some prominent people defended them on twitter. that took me by surprise.

could it be that people from inside (or who have been inside) don't see things the way others do? kinda like a stockholm syndrome thing?

just curious...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com