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The most interesting thing about Google is its founders hated advertising.

Tim Wu

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Tim Wu
Age: 54
Academic
Journalist
Legal Scholar
Washington
District of Columbia
Timothy Wu
Timothy Shiou-Ming Wu
吳修銘
Advertising
Hated
Interesting
Thing
Founders
Google

More quotes by Tim Wu

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Wikipedia, a nonprofit, is an enormously popular website but has managed to operate without advertising. And, you know, maybe it's a little simpler than Google and YouTube, but it does show there's another way.
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Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.
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Socialization would be the most successful thing to bring mainstream audiences to online computers.
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BE THE MEDIA is uplifting and empowering.
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The Holy Grail of advertising has always been advertisement that people want to watch, which occasionally happens. You know, the Super Bowl, people sit there and watch the advertisements. Some print advertising is very beautiful.
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Movies you pay for - well, sometimes they throw some ads at the beginning now - but generally you pay for ads. And that business model - actually, much more ancient, paying for stuff - is much more straightforward in terms of the incentives of the people who are then giving you the stuff.
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In fact, the big steps forward for advertising, especially after World War I were when government just began employing the tools of advertising for its own purposes to get people to join the army and other things.
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Hitler understood the demagogues' essential principle to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.
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When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.
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The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.
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Starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads.
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The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.
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There's a problem which is when you're trapped in your own identity and everything is really you, then you feel less freedom to sort of explore who you want to be. So I think it's kind of something we're stuck with as long as humans are the way we are.
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I am the most concerned that we end up in a situation where your - everything is known about you and so therefore, not only Google, but Google, Facebook, Twitter - the whole set of companies - essentially knows all your weaknesses and therefore how to manipulate you in subtle ways in order to have you do things you might not otherwise do.
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I don't think anyone at Google feels happy about it, but they've been in some sense, you know, enslaved to their business model, and so they have to satisfy their advertisers.
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Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.
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One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.
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I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.
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You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences.
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We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.
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