WHAT WOULD GOOGLE DO

The Internet, though, is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack. And that power is held by Google. Thus, while the audiences advertisers crave are now hopelessly fractured amongst an effectively infinite number of publishers, t... See more

It seems to me, then, that the only long-term solution is to acquire customers directly, and to monetize them directly. The Internet is an efficiency machine, which means that closely related objectives, a la publishers seeking to reach more readers and advertisers seeking to reach more customers, are not sufficient; content and business need to be... See more

Thanks to this powerful data network effect, Google was able to move down the stack. Google wasn’t “just a website” anymore, it became an aggregator that commoditized all other websites and made them layers on top of Google’s.