This Is How Google Will Collapse

Reporting on Google’s future with today’s facts

Daniel Colin James
Forward Tick

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Illustration: Mandela Smith

Google made almost all its money from ads. It was a booming business—until it wasn’t. Here’s how things looked right before the most spectacular crash the technology industry had ever seen.

The crumbling of Google’s cornerstone

Back when Google was still just an idea, its founders thought that “advertising funded search engines [would] be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

They changed their minds.

With that change, Google became one of the wealthiest, most powerful companies in history. Search was Google’s golden goose, as well as its only unambiguous win. So when Amazon rapidly surpassed Google as the top product search destination in 2017, Google’s foundations began to falter.

Amazon was fighting Google on its home turf, and it was winning. Even worse, the people turning to Amazon over Google for their shopping searches were from the most important group for advertisers and the future: young people. Advertisers followed them, and Amazon began to siphon away ad dollars that once went to Google search ads. Google’s mighty engine had started to sputter.

Google realized that it…

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Daniel Colin James
Forward Tick

Software Engineer at Blackbird (soon). Infinitely curious. Relentlessly optimistic. Rarely serious.