The thing that struck me most was that for 25 of 27 years, they have relied entirely on machines and computers to manage the condition which means every hard-earned lesson you have experienced they did not and the author likely has very little person knowledge and experience on how to do anything off the pump.
It's the AI argument in a nutshell. We are handing things off to machines and losing the knowledge to do it ourselves.
Imagine if this were a systemic catastrophic failure, that lasted months... how many people would perish just because they weren't taught or never learned how to manage without the machine.
They were a fairly common occurrence in the late 90s. I worked at an OEM at the time and we would stockpile it during gluts for that reason, then make a killing ~6-9 months later.
They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.
Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be
People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms.
Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.
...and it really hasn't been for a good number of years now. I left a while ago when results were all SEO copy pasta blogs this is just a final nail in the coffin.
I am truly, deeply sorry for revealing my true feelings on how much I value some of the employees that helped me become utterly, filthy rich. It will not happen again.
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