(10) zuboff_ch3_pts_IV.-VI.
Chapter 3: Discovery of Behavioral Surplus

IV. Discovery of Behavioral Surplus
	-Late 2000, looking for better ways to make money, Google takes over matching users with advertisements. 
	-no advertiser had EVER before allowed that, let alone paid for it. 
	-in order to do this, Google used collected user data to make ads “relevant” to/targeted at users.
	“The raw materials that had been solely used to improve the quality of search results would now• also be put to use in the service of targeted advertising to individual users . . . The growing stores of collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and its advertisers. These behavioral data available for uses beyond service improvements constituted a surplus . . .” Behavioral surplus would lead to higher profits.

2002: the team discovered that search results often followed/mirrored real world events and provided even more “relevance” to targeting.
-Eric Schmidt was hired as chairman (the VCs had insisted that an adult be brought into the room). They soon made him CEO.
-Google’s ad placement paid based on targeted location of the adverts. OVERTURE, instead, used an online auction that tagged placement to keyword searches. Google STOLE the auction and added a multiplier: likelihood of the user clicking on the advert.
-2003: Google patented “generating user information for use in targeted advertising.”
-advertising had always been a guessing game. “the idea of being able to deliver particular message to particular person at just the moment when it might have a high probability of actually influencing his or her behavior was, and has always been, the holy grail of advertising.”
- User profile information (UPI) would not only be gleaned from Google's collection of user data, but would also be inferred, presumed, introduced from a wide-ranging collection on and off the Internet.
-The patent application made clear that Google would pay no attention to the orientation of the user toward their own privacy. That instead, the company would collect whatever data it needed or wanted or could use in any way it chose or could. The decision rights of users were stripped from the equation.
-the patent declares that advertisers are not able to make these decisions – – that only Google has the data that enables this process.

V. Surplus at Scale
-click through rates replaced impressions and simple clicks as metrics.
-the term auction distracted buyers from what they were actually paying Google for – – not so much the terms as the derivatives of behavioral surplus.
-Google developed a quality score that help determine the pricing of ads (remember that establishing price had been perhaps the most thorny problem in deciding how to advertise online).
-putting this all together the AdWords program became the prototypical bleeding edge in monetizing behavioral surplus.

2010: AdWords produced revenue of $10B annually. Page and Brin changed their minds about advertising and about profit. Oh… and saved the company.

VI. A Human Invention
-Zuboff makes the point that I've often repeated – surveillance capitalism was invented by specific people at a specific time and place. It was not the natural result of the evolution of digital technology. It was not self-determined by the Internet.
-as early as 1996 cookies were a contested public-policy issue; by 1997, regulators were discussing making data collection defaults favor users. In 2000, the Clinton administration banned cookies from all federal websites and in 2001 Congress examined three bills that would have banned or regulated cookies. Nothing came of these restrictions except the federal ban on cookies remains for federal websites.
-By Google’s IPO in 2004, company revenues topped $3.2B annually.