If you're a new company, buying ads can help you get customers who would otherwise have bought something from your older, more well-known competitor.
Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.
Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.
My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.
However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.
With ads the big company gets 99% of the mindshare and the small one gets 1%.