By that logic, any product/organization that generates revenue mainly through ads would be an ad company. Search is the product that (probably) carries most of the ads revenues, so that's the main product, and ads are the means for generating revenue around it.
> By that logic, any product/organization that generates revenue mainly through ads would be an ad company.
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.
Last I checked Google doesn't 'sell your information to people', but it does offer hyper targeted ads; the ethics of both scenarios are deeply rotten to me.
> Last I checked Google doesn't 'sell your information to people', but it does offer hyper targeted ads
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.
It's digital pimping. Google are fully-automated, mass-scale digital pimps. They pimp your eyeballs out to Johns who pay for the privilege of mindfucking you, with the help of an extremely sophisticated matchmaking and realtime auction system. In return, you get nice handbags (YouTube) and get your hair did (GMail).
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.
Yes, because they get a competitive advantage when they hold all that information for themselves.
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.
