Google launched as a free public beta in the Fall of 1998. It was a revelation – a 10X improvement on Internet navigation and research. But from its launch forward, Google’s founders were hounded with questions as to how their company planned on actually making money. John Doerr, one of Google’s earliest backers, famously answered that question by citing Google’s extraordinary growth: With all that traffic, he said, we’ll figure it out.
Google’s founders were famously suspicious of advertising – in their white paper explaining Google’s PageRank technology, Larry Page and Sergey Brin argued that advertising-funded search engines would be “inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”
Two years later, Google launched AdWords, which became a multi-hundred-billion dollar advertising business over the following two decades.
We all knew that OpenAI was going to follow Google’s path into advertising, and late last week the company made it official. There is *a lot* to unpack around this announcement, but it’ll have to wait: I’m starting a new gig this week, teaching a seminar on the impact of technology at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I’ll be spending a fair bit of time in my former home of Northern California, and once I get settled, I’ll return to a more regular posting schedule here. In the meantime, if you find yourself in NorCal and you’d like to reconnect, let me know!