i remember in 2004 or so when an agency i worked for had a wikipedia clone running with adsense and tons of SEO which made 20k per month and basically kept the company afloat. I was a young junior dev and while i was impressed by it, it never felt right to me (which it obviously wasn't in many ways). As far as i remember this only worked for about a year at best until Google penalised those sites more and more.
Can someone explain how Google makes so much money with their ad system and how its related to these kinds of ads? Google originally planned never to do ads. They changed course I think 2002 or so, and are now worth 500B$.
This is a rosy way to look at things after-the-fact, but, as far as I understand, the way Google monetized their search (by showing only relevant ads) was still a fairly new business practice at the time. And Adsense wasn't well tested either. Both were bets that ended up transforming the entire online Ad industry...
Google AI is crushing it; I haven't used Google Search since like 2017. Given how successful YouTube is though I don't even think Google Search is a critical portion of AdSense revenue at this point.
It's even worse. I started an entertainment website in 1998, when the Internet had a competitive search and advertising landscape. I didn't rely on a single source for traffic or revenue.
Today, Google Search sends the vast majority of that site's traffic and Google Adsense pays me for that traffic. I wasn't tied when I started, but I sure am now.
> If I recall history correctly, Google was the first to monetize SERPs with ads.
You don't. All major SE that predated Google did so, from AltaVista to Yahoo... I used to maintain a CGI-based wrapper for a bunch of SE (these 2 plus "USE IT!", Lycos, Infoseek, WWWW, anyone remember them?) in the mid-/late 90's that removed the annoying ads from search results.
Google was the first SE with text based ads though, from what I remember.
"The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter"
The value of Google's ad network, including the average cost per click, increased for 14 years in a row, roughly speaking. Google certainly isn't suffering from any supposed value decrease per quarter, and if that effect were actually in place, their business would be nearly worthless by now.
None, because the data asymmetry is how Google earns revenue. If they just sold the data, you'd set up a competing ad network that undercuts AdSense by operating on slightly outdated snapshots.
But I think at some point the operating committee at Google looked at monetization of all the things Google has done and if you included search advertising the in the bar graph everything else looked like zero. And you ask yourself "We've got all these smart people doing all these projects and not a single one even comes CLOSE to the income that search advertising does? Give me one good reason I shouldn't just fire all of them?"
Funny nobody mentioned until now, but from what I've read, that's what happened to Yahoo. Apparently years ago they were so successful with the ads on their "portal" that not much more could matter. Maybe somebody has good links at hand? The similarities seem to be really big.
That was in the original pagerank publications. Google had lots of other early attempts to make money that avoided advertising (like the search appliance [0]), but the firehose of money from ads dwarfed anything else they could ever find and that early Google didn't last long.
Right, but Google without the ad revenue would be zero. Google without the search revenue would be a shadow of it's former self, but ad revenue would surely not be zero as YouTube and myriad of other services still exist.
- 2000 censorship, business, big data and ads ads - $$
- 2010 code learning projects, quora, reddit, iphone, spam indexing and seo ads ads ads ads - $$$
- 2020 ai indexing everywhere, no-code indexing and code is a porn of no-code now so ads and ads ads ads seo seo seo - $$$$$$
- 2030 profit $googleplex?
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