Advertising and Attention

Google's search engine is free, and its ad business has generated hundreds of billions in profit. You are not the customer. You are the product. Broadcast TV figured this out in the 1950s: give people something to watch, then sell their eyeballs to advertisers. Google refined it to an extreme, charging premium rates because search queries reveal exactly what you want to buy. Alphabet reported roughly $238 billion in advertising revenue in fiscal 2023. Meta did the same to the social graph, turning years of activity tracking into targeting precision advertisers happily pay for.

For founders and operators, the ad model is built on a fault line that never closes: users want less advertising and more signal, advertisers want more placement and more precision, and the platform serves the side that pays. Tip too far toward extraction and users leave or regulators arrive, and both have happened. There is a minimum scale below which advertisers will not take you seriously at all, and a structural condition that decides whether the whole thing holds. What that threshold is, and what makes the model break, is what the app holds back.