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Comment by tpurves | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for calling this out. Here is a better comparison. Before Google was founded, the market for online search advertising was negligible. But the global market for all advertising media spend was on the order of 400B (NYT 1998). Today, Google's advertising revenue is around 260B / year or about 60% of the entire global advertising spend circa 1998.

If you think of openAI like a new google, as in a new category-defining primary channel for consumers to search and discover products. Well, 2% does seem pretty low.

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>Today, Google's advertising revenue is around 260B / year or about 60% of the entire global advertising spend circa 1998.

Or about 30% of the global advertising spend circa 2024.

I wonder if there is an upper bound on what portion of the economy can be advertising. At some point it must become saturated. People can only consume so much marketing.

Advertising is in many market like a tax or tariff - something all businesses needs to pay. Think of selling consumer goods online - you need ads on social media to bring in customers. Spending 10% on ads as COGS is a no brainer. 20% too. Maybe it could go as high as 50% - if the companies do not really have an alternative, and all the competitors ard doing it too? They are just going to pass the bill to the consumer anyway...

But that occurred with a new form of media that people now use in more of their time than back before Google. It implies AI is growth in time spent. I think the trend is more likely that AI will replace other media.

i hate to be that guy, but.. before google was around, it was the first wave of commercial internet - for all of what five years? Online search was a thing, in-fact it was THE thing across many vendors and all relied on advertising revenue. Revenue on the internet which was ramping up still for dotcom era in those few years. Google's ad revenue vs 98 global ad spend revenue - is that inflation adjusted? Global markets development since then, internet economy expansion, even sheer number of people alive.. completely different worlds.

What might stand from comparison is google introduced a good product people wanted to use and innovative approach to marketing at the time which was unobtrusive. Product drive the traffic. It was quite a bit before Google figured it all out though.

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