Google searches are free for a reason.

You are the product being sold.

"Free" means whoever is providing the service has found a way to monetize you, very likely in a way you don't see or understand. 

It isn't necessary bad, but it is nice to know the score.

Google Ad report for the week

Google searches are free. So is Gmail. Google makes tens of billions of dollars every quarter by selling ads, targeted to you, based on your activity.

When a person does a search, or when they drift from one topic to another on the web, Google tracks where they have been. Google learns something very valuable. Google lets advertisers target ads to exactly the people who would likely be interested in the product or service of the advertiser, based on that web tracking.  

I have a small ad buy on Google promoting my blog. I specified that the ads should show up on the searches of adults who were interested in political news who live within 20 miles of my home in Medford--my effort to increase my local audience. (More of my readers are spread out around the country.) Sometimes when I am looking at a political site--Politico, Washington Post, Fox News, The Nation, Breitbart--I see my ad in the middle of an article. 

Google Ad location target

The targeting works. People who go to those sites are in fact the people most likely to be interested in this blog. Google is like Santa in that Christmas song for children: "He knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake." Google knows where you have been and what might influence you. Some months ago I had occasion to look up the mileage of current Volvos for an idea I was considering for this blog. That search brought me to the Volvo website. Beginning that week I began getting ads for new Volvos wherever I went on the web. Google saw I searched Volvos so maybe I am in the market to buy one. Volvo was happy to learn that.

Search is free because Google is selling my search history.

I also have a small ad for this blog on the KOBI-TV website. www.kobi5.com KOBI is the NBC-affiliated TV station for the Medford region. They run news shows morning, evening, and late, so presumably people see KOBI as a credible place to get local and national news, including at their website.

Today my ad looks like this. I decided to emphasize the fact that I am not a whack-job conspiracy nut. Since I am independent of any institutional affiliation, I don't have the imprimatur, for better or worse, of some well-established brand. I am the brand, just me. I am trying to be a bit provocative by saying I write "sane" commentary, as distinguished from other presumably-less-sane writers. I attempt to make a virtue out of my independence. I have refused to be a cheerleader for Democrats, which had the advantage of helping me see earlier than most commentators that Donald Trump had the "magic sauce" that would win far more votes than the polls suggested, both in 2016 and 2020. Media companies, podcasters, and bloggers have figured out that people want their opinions validated, not challenged, so they do narrow-casting for an audience that wants a reliable slant with a tone of self-righteous certainty. I hate that kind of commentary so I don't do it. I get negative feedback from Democratic readers and it diminishes my potential audience. Republicans don't like the faint praise I give Trump by calling him an extraordinarily talented and successful con man, narcissist, and demagogue. Oh, well.

I say "non-corporate" because I hear from readers on both left and right that they don't trust "corporate news." Their presumption is that the news is filtered--maybe created--by corporate overlords. Corporate meddling is not an idle fear. Local TV stations nationwide--including one here in Medford--are being bought up by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. They require stations to air "must run" conservative commentary pieces. Conservative opinions aren't what bothers me. I dislike that they require local news anchors to read verbatim laudatory introductions to the packaged commentaries. I think that diminishes the credibility of local news anchors. 

So I advertise on KOBI, the one remaining locally owned station in my home region. They have not tried to edit my ad copy and I don't think they follow me around on the web to re-sell my search history. Most of the time my ads on KOBI are catchy headlines summarizing that day's blog post. "Spend, spend, spend. What could go wrong." was a recent one. 

I don't know if the ads work to draw new readers. Do any internet ads work? Lots of people apparently see the ads, both on KOBI and the Google ones that appear on political sites. Both Google and KOBI report to me high number of "impressions." (Google claims about 2,000 impressions a day.) I suppose I see ads all the time, but I don't think I notice them, excepting that Volvo ad coming right after a search. 

I like having ads on a local TV station; I hope they work. I have misgivings about advertising with Google. On one hand I realize how handy it is to have really relevant ads. The fact that Google snoops on me means I would get ads for heartburn cures the day after I searched the word "heartburn." It is creepy, but convenient, and I can always ignore the ads. And since this blog platform--blogspot--is owned by Google, perhaps tomorrow I will start getting heartburn ads on political sites. After all, I have written the word "heartburn" four times in this paragraph. Maybe I am in the market to buy medicine. Tums would want to know.

Google is free because Google knows everything about me. Too much, maybe. I traded privacy for the convenience of getting useful searches. But are they useful to me, or are they useful to the advertisers? Google's responses to my searches queries are what Google wants me to know, presented as being objective. It isn't. 

They aren't just answering my questions. They are shaping my reality.