Everything Is Marketing is Everything

If you wait long enough, everything seems to evolve into a crab. Biologists call this “carcinisation”. On the internet, sooner or later everything seems to evolve into a marketing platform. In this article, I will show you how that happens, what consequences it has, and what it might mean for you.

Let’s start with some examples.

Facebook is an obvious one — a platform started basically as a clone of Hot-Or-Not, a platform for rating the attractiveness of your school mates — evolving into an easy way to build a personal blog/website, struggling to find its business plan even as it had millions of users. It finally found it: it is now one of the top advertising platforms worldwide, topped only by Google.

Google is, of course, known for its search engine — so much so, that “to google” is now a verb synonymous with online search. But what is their main revenue? It is advertising, plain and simple. Most of it comes directly from the search engine (“Google AdWords”), 10% or so comes from google affiliates that post the ads on their websites, and similar. And an ever-increasing part comes from Google-owned YouTube.

YouTube is a platform to upload and watch videos. For many, it has now become the main entertainment/infotainment channel, replacing traditional TV. How does it make money? By advertising of course. Just like “traditional” TV channels did before it.

So much for the obvious examples. How about this one: it started as an online bookshop…