Are you sure? Where's the citation to back that up?

What I remember are many products released around that time by Google, et al that were sold to us as: we're making gobs of money off of our core offering (e.g. search + little text-based ads), that we can afford to all this other stuff for the benefit of humanity. So much was sold as "making the world a better place". The other sales pitch we got amounted to, "don't worry about it, we'll monetize later."

Nobody was up-front in those days. Which is why not a month has gone by where ToS or Privacy Policy changes need another click to accept to keep using. The frog was certainly slow-boiled.