AdTech
Advertising pays for most of our online experience. We consume free content and services in return for looking at some ads. Fair deal, or so it seems. Upon examination, there are some dark twists - according to Shoshana Zuboff Ad Tech is at the origin of surveillance capitalism. The story begins innocuously enough: Google's founders had little enthusiasm for advertising. This changes when the dot com bubble bursts in the spring of 2000. They then embrace advertising to survive, bringing a new twist that makes the company fabulously wealthy and immensely powerful. The dominant advertising model before the bust was banner ads sold by sales reps on a cost-per-thousand impressions basis (CPM). In contrast, Google sold unobtrusive text ads to appear in a sidebar. Sergey Brin is quoted as saying "It didn't generate much money." In October 2000 Google introduces AdWords , a self-service platform allowing advertisers to purchase advertisements when the search query match