Interesting article on what’s happened to the business model of newspapers at Virulent Word of Mouse. There’s a lot of discussion of the mechanics and technical developments that pulled advertising into Google’s world, including … And that’s despite the fact that Google was not selling ads at the beginning.
A little later, Google invented one more thing, placing ads in designated places inside blogs, usually in little rectangle windows. A site can arrange this with Google, and Google splits the money from the ads with the site.
That invention is clever. Once again, it combines a bit of technical cleverness with a bit of imaginative energy. The computer science was not easy, but this should be understood as more than merely a technical invention. It involved a lot of entrepreneurial imagination and it involved building an organization behind it.
It also was important. It was responsible for fueling a big part of the boom in sites like Huffington Post, and others who have a little space to rent next to their blog posts.
That started to happen in 2003 and by the middle of the decade it had spread madly. “Ads by Google” became a common statement all over the web. Many little and big sites began using Google’s ad services, paying only for clicks. It was convenient, especially for smaller sites, generating enough revenue to support an inexpensive site.
It changed the ecosystem of the web. The long tail of ad-supported web began to depend on it. Many niches sites expanded accordingly. Once again, this is a long story, and I am merely giving the short version of it. Just suffice to say, however, this was another source of substitutes for news.
But it was still much more than Google:
One invention did not lead to the decline of newspapers, and one firm did not do it either. The loss of readers and the loss of ads came from the accumulation of a number of events.
Who is responsible? Let’s count. We have blamed Craigslist, other online classified sites, Overture, NSF funding, Silicon Valley’s ecosystem, the efforts of many clever computer scientists, and the efforts of many bloggers.
Given Google’s role and in the context of the current Jihad against governmental spending on most everything, it’s worth noting how important government funding was to seeding the core technologies and mathematics. No doubt, some would consider that a government boondoggle.
Let’s consider for a moment why Larry and Sergey went to Stanford to get graduate degrees. Both were interested in information theory and practice. Their advisers were too. Their advisers got their money came from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency supporting research. Indeed, NSF had helped grow the Internet backbone and many other facets of the computer science that grew into the Internet, so NSF views itself (rightly) as one of the parents of the Internet.
Did the NSF want to start a new firm like Google? Of course not. NSF was funding initiatives to improve information retrieval and storage, a long standing topic in computer science. But for years such efforts had made only incremental progress because everybody focused on information retrieval in libraries. When the web started to explode, these initiatives were taken up again, and reconsidered, and re-imagined for the web. NSF actually did its job, recognizing a new opportunity, moving funding to it, and seeding research.
Did NSF know what would come from it? No, that is not the way federal funding works at the NSF, thankfully. NSF gives its scientists considerable discretion to apply the research as the scientists, so long as it stays within the domain of the topic outlined when the research was funded.
Let me say it this way. The page rank algorithm that Larry Page and Sergey Brin employed for their first search engines was standard mathematics by the late 1990s, invented many years earlier. They recognized its application to the web. That was their initial novelty. NSF could not have foreseen that, but NSF should get credit for funding general research in this area, which had enormous economic potential. The payoff to society in this case far exceeded the money spent.
At least as of this moment, there are some interesting comments (5) as well.
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Craig's List,
Google,
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