It occurred to me recently: Google is surreptitiously taking over the ad industry, but in a way nobody is really talking about.

Say you buy an advertisement on Google AdWords for your business. Whenever that advertisement is displayed (on sites like mine, who use AdSense to generate revenue off our freely-available content), it is displayed alongside the phrase “Ads by Google”. So when you pay money to Google to advertise yourself, not only are they making money, but they get to publish an endless number of free advertisements for their own services. And if your business is “to organize the world’s information“, then it only makes sense that you would want to get your company name out there at every possible chance, associating yourself with every information interaction and value exchange that occurs around information.

With this same sort of thinking, you could also - technically - argue that ads you see on television are actually ads *for* television as a medium itself. Which seems to me to be a true statement, if oblique in terms of its immediate usefulness.