Google and Advertising – Digital Capitalism

Google’s dominance over the web allows it to dictate numerous norms and practices that regulate the state of contemporary capitalism online. How Google operates as a company and generates revenue is often sidelined in academic discussions regarding the cultural implications of how its search engine functions. Almost 90% of Google’s revenue is derived from advertising.

Adwords and AdSense propose that these financial models have significant effects on online disclosure. Adwords demonstrates some of the tensions between the local and the global that develop where tracing flows of information and capital while AdSense demonstrates how Google's hegemonic control prescribes which parts of the web can generate revenue and which cannot.

 Evidence is provided that Google’s AdSense program along with Google’s relationship with Facebook, incentivized the rise of fake news in the 2016 US presidential election. Google has two main advertising ventures, the first of which is ‘Google Properties’ the service for hosting advertisements built into its products like its search engine and Gmail for example; the most notable part of which is Adwords. The second is ‘Google Network Member's properties, a brokerage service that runs advertisements on third-party websites, the most significant part of which is AdSense.

Adwords and AdSense have different impacts and highlight one pertinent consequence of each, the reification of language and the rise of fake news, respectively. 71.3% of Google’s revenues come from advertising on Google’s sites and are mainly derived from Adwords. Adwords is an auction process that Google operates to allocate paid results to search engine queries, which sit separately on top or to the side of unpaid results referred to by Google as organic results.

 17.4% of Google’s overall revenue is derived from non-Google sites on which Google hosts third-party advertising content using its AdSense program. AdSense is Google’s method of linking third-party advertisements to relevant third-party content, such as blogs or new sites, and displaying advertisements alongside selected content in digital billboards. Other company’s offer third-party advertising, but Google AdSense is by far the largest. The remaining 11.3% of the alphabet’s revenue represents the sales of apps and media content in the Google Play Store, as well as other smaller ventures such as certain Google, branded hardware, for example, sales of Google Chrome books and Pixel Smartphone.

 Almost all of Google’s revenue is made from advertising; Most of this advertising revenue comes from Adwords and Google spends a majority of its revenue on smaller ambitious ventures. Adwords functions as a ‘global real-time and multilingual market’ mapping capital directly to specific words and phrases that seem at odds with the kinds of advertising that set to establish a generalized demand in a mass market. The algorithmic rating and auction system select a specific sponsored link to mean that Adwords serves the most relevant advertisement. Google’s algorithm, as with its organic results, aims to weed out any misleading, irrelevant articles.

The standardized format in which sponsored links are presented cuts out the art of advertising Adwords barely seems like advertising at all. However, these superficial descriptions are not what defines advertising; Google’s Adwords functions to structure and control the flow of information and capital. The grammar of digital capitalism is a reflection of Google’s structuring of the web. Adwords function as the intermediary form of communication between companies, markets, and individuals that reflect the new grammar of digital commerce.

For Example, searching for ‘Shakespeare’ results in many high-quality results. High-quality in the sense that the results are from reputable sources and pertain to William Shakespeare. However, this hierarchy of quality has not been created by Google; the PageRank algorithm only reflects the existing values of web users that are linked to these sites. Google receives revenue for the usefulness to these results as the responsibility for the curation and hierarchy lies within the community as a whole: journalists, bloggers, and any kind of user that contributes online but the online entrants are not getting paid for their contributions.

 Digital capitalism cannot be thrown away as an irrelevant concept. This is because promoting competition and efficiency is primarily the way of life for all human beings and is now only done through a different medium. It is essential both for the producer and consumer. However, to prevent cross-border criminal activity such as terrorism. The negative effects of its growth need to be contained. There is a need to have developed mechanism to filter only the good part of it to reach the public