People always _always_ forget that Google today is an ad company first.
They do search, phones and mobile operating systems as side projects.
They do search, phones and mobile operating systems as side projects.
What logic? The person you’re replying to didn’t explain their reasoning, so any logic you’re seeing is being constructed in your own head and projected onto someone else. In other words, you’re likely responding to an argument you’ve seen (and disagreed with) before instead of what that poster had in mind (which may or may not jive with what is in your head).
Google doesn’t just show ads, they track you and have the infrastructure to sell your information to people who buy ad space. That is fundamentally different from a website that makes money by showing ads, many of which they don’t pick themselves. So yes, Google is an ad company. And they’re one “first” because that’s where their efforts are, not because of the revenue. YouTube, Chrome, their web proposals, it all serves the same goal: ads, ads, ads, and keeping Google’s dominance in the space.
So you understand what I’m talking about. I didn’t mean selling the information directly. Because why would they, they make more money by keeping the data to themselves and selling you out indirectly from the information they gathered over and over.
Calling it "ads" and Google an "advertising company" is just making a vague allusion to what's really going on and does not carry the proper connotation of exploitation.
They have your email (gmail), location history (google maps), search history (google), viewing history (youtube) and know pretty much every site you've visited (chrome + ad network).
This is the data they aggregate and sell to advertisers so that their ads can target highly specific groups of people - they don't want the advertisers getting the direct dataset, that would be competition.
First-hand account from me that this is not factual at all.
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes.
I can go on and on, and yeah, we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels, but to say FAANG doesn’t sell user data is naive at best.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
They are obviously not only an ad company, but GP only claimed that they are an ad company "first". Can you please clarify which part you consider oversimplified?
Are they a livestreaming "first" business-man/company/sole trader?
Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all and end all of determining what your key business concern is, or what your business should put first.
Maybe, it depends on what they do next. Will they start uploading fewer videos and live-streaming more because they realised that’s where the money is?
> Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all and end all of determining what your key business concern is, or what your business should put first.
Agreed. But Google does put ads first. All the tracking, web proposals, Chrome, it’s all in service of ads. Perhaps you’re using an ad blocker and that’s making you forget, but Google’s services, like search and YouTube, are huge blobs of ads with a few bits of content sprinkled throughout and the ratio is getting worse in the ads’ favour. So yes, Google is an ad company. Not because it makes the most money from it, but because most of its effort is in expanding and defending their ad revenue. Heck, they literally spend billions of dollars just to make sure you search with their engine to see their ads.
True, but in addition to the revenue Google ALSO tailors all their products to facilitate their advertising products. It's sort of like a singer who sells merch. The merch makes money but it also props up the singers singing career and funds tours.
Chrome revolves around ads, android revolves around ads, maps revolves around ads, gmail revolves around ads. If you take a hard look at all their products their all linked to Google's advertisement offerings in one way or another. That, to me, means adtech is their main line of business.
Yes. And if you press them economically, it will show.
The only difference is that most people do not optimize their lives for profit.
They could perhaps pivot, but at that moment, the superchats only exist because of the non-live content they put out.
It’s something people have a really difficult time preaching logically, the veil of deception of many things. Another big example is TV, which are ad sales companies, not TV show distributors, even if they’ve successfully swindled people into a mindset where they actually pay the providers, for the privilege of being sold advertisement.
It’s really a rather interesting and eye opening segment of largely the US society that is both extremely dominant and has effectively been extremely damaging, and yet, people simply cannot see that they are like mindless drones, being programmed and reprogrammed with TV shows and advertisement.
I'm vaguely aware of a code leak but haven't delved into the details; I'm curious if you have a link to details about this data harvesting?
I guess any information <system? network? Broadcaster?> fares badly against financial consolidation of its <servers / distributors ?>
Advertisements are one part of the fall - it forces a fight for attention, and that is a limited resource.
We know enough about gaming Attention today, and that converges content that drives revenue in a similar direction, creating a conformity of content that is reproduced.
As revenues decline, independent nodes on the network get consolidated, so that you have very similar messages being sent.
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Counter point: As content generated increases, people turn to trusted sources to find out what’s true.
That said, trusted sources aren’t just the big media houses, it’s whoever people trust.
So some part of the consolidation effect is reduced by having more sources of content.
But the new sources of content exist, because they can afford to exist. So it comes back to the fact that advertising subsidizes independent creators.
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Guess the final point would be that this evolves into a discussion on resources and orchestrated information dissemination.