First, zeroing in on their essence helps demystify those tech superpowers.
I am stressing the point for two reasons. It’s not breaking news that Google and Facebook are souped-up versions of old-school advertising mediums like newspapers or radio. (Facebook likely won’t mention this today, when it plans to discuss the company’s vision of us living, shopping and working in its virtual reality world.) Facebook generated 98 percent of its revenue from ads. But like everything else about these companies, it’s complicated and important.Īlphabet, the corporate entity that includes Google, made about 80 percent of its revenue this year from the ads that we see when searching the web, watching YouTube videos, checking out Google Maps and more. It’s less jazzy to think about digital advertising that these tech titans have popularized. There’s a vigorous public debate about the benefits and serious trade-offs of the digital worlds that Google and Facebook created. (OK, Hearst’s newspapers probably didn’t have ads for leggings.) They do essentially the same thing that William Randolph Hearst did a century ago: They draw our attention to try to sell us yoga pants. The reality, though, is that these tech companies are rich and powerful because they are the biggest sellers of advertising in the world. Metaverse! Driverless cars! Cloud! Artificial intelligence! Google and Facebook love to talk about the cutting-edge stuff that they’re working on.
This article is part of the On Tech newsletter.
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