Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

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> now we consider Google an ad company first

Google has been an ad company way before 2013.

AdWords was launched in 2000. Google bought DoubleClick in 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick

Second paragraph of the Google 2004 financial report (first paragraph described what Google is):

    We generate revenue by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising. Businesses use our AdWords program to promote their products and services with targeted advertising. In addition, the thousands of third-party web sites that comprise our Google Network use our Google AdSense program to deliver relevant ads that generate revenue and enhance the user experience.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312505...

Note they did not say "Google is now an ad company", it was "now we consider Google an ad company first", it is a matter of perception.

In 2013 it was not a commonly held position that Google was primarily an ad company.

It's neither here nor there, but it's worth mentioning that Google as a search engine was around for five years before that SEC filing. As I'm sure you remember, that was a very long time in the history of the Internet to that point. Plenty of time to build good will and ruin it later, as we saw a similar pattern with Chrome years later.

Google was routinely referred to as "one-trick pony" already by the end of 00s due to the obvious fact that 95% of its revenues were from search ads.

IMO the difference is that many people perceived it as a benign deal - someone would take money from the advertisers and use it to actually make a better product for the users. It took a while for enough people to realize that this very reliance on ads means that "better product" from Google's perspective is not necessarily better for the users.

Although by 2013, I'd say that even that was not an uncommon sentiment, especially since Google started doing stuff like this around then: https://commerce.googleblog.com/2012/05/building-better-shop...

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