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Comment by lostmsu | Hacker News Reader

I am sorry, but at what time Google or Facebook were not ad machines?

They've always been ad machines, but once upon a time Google was the good guy of the ad world. Even regular sites used to be full of punch the monkey ads, popups and pop-unders. Google with its dainty little text-only ads neatly on the side of search results was a real breath of fresh air, and we all cheered when Chrome came along and started blocking many of the most annoying ad tactics.

Not only that, e.g. Google's support for open source and open standards was huge at a time when not many did, for example.

When they first announced the Summer of Code the common response was "wow, Google really is special like that".

"Even regular sites used to be full of punch the monkey ads, popups and pop-unders."

Commercial sites were. But there was a time before corporations started treating the internet like the Gold Rush. Before that the internet was actually not full of ads, much less all the spyware the likes of Google and Facebook brought.

But Google and Facebook are just two big worms in an internet that's been rotten by corporate influence.

That time largely predates Google though? Google was founded in 1998, and the first monkey punch ad was 1999.

True. The internet was already ad-infested by the time Google came around. AltaVista, which was the dominant search engine before Google overthrew them was full of ads, and (ironically) Google's value proposition at the time was that it was ad-free and a lot faster than AltaVista (which was slowed down by all their ads).

How times have changed.

Google wasn't an ad machine prior to the dotcom crash. Before the crash they had a very small advertising group, and it was pretty maligned.

It's also somewhat important to differentiate between "doing advertising" and surveillance capitalism. The scope/scale is completely different.

1998 - 2000

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self...

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