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Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, in detail
Ken Auletta has been writing about media and power for the New Yorker since the 1990s, and Googled is his attempt to explain what Google did to the industries that preceded it. Published in 2009, just over a decade after Google's founding, the book was written with unusual access: Auletta interviewed Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt, and many of the executives at the newspapers, television networks, and advertising agencies that Google was quietly destroying.
The book's structure alternates between Google's history and the industries it disrupted. On one side: the story of how two Stanford graduate students built a search algorithm, added advertising that worked when traditional advertising was failing, and assembled an engineering culture that treated every problem as a data problem. On the other side: the story of newspaper publishers, television executives, and Madison Avenue veterans who understood something was happening to them but couldn't figure out what, or how to respond. Auletta is sympathetic to both sides — he does not treat the incumbents as simply slow or venal, and he does not treat Google as simply heroic.
The core of his argument is that Google's disruption was not primarily technological. It was cultural and epistemological. Google's engineering culture — data-driven, skeptical of intuition, committed to transparency — was genuinely foreign to industries built on relationships, expertise, and the soft knowledge of what audiences want. Google didn't just take market share from newspapers and TV. It undermined the business model (the advertising cross-subsidy) that paid for journalism and original programming, and it did so without understanding or caring much about what it was eliminating.
The book was published before the full effects of that disruption were visible. Much of what Auletta predicted — the hollowing out of local journalism, the collapse of classified advertising, the restructuring of the advertising industry around programmatic buying — has now happened. Re-reading Googled today, the prescient passages are striking. Auletta sees the threat more clearly than most of the executives he interviews. Where the book shows its age is in its treatment of Facebook, Twitter, and the social web as peripheral developments rather than the next wave of disruption that would, in turn, challenge Google itself.
The big ideas
- 1.
Google's original insight was that advertising that worked — that delivered customers who actually wanted what was being sold — was worth far more than advertising that reached large audiences indiscriminately.
- 2.
The advertising cross-subsidy model that paid for newspapers, television news, and magazines was not protected by law or consumer loyalty — it was protected only by the absence of a better alternative. Google provided one.
- 3.
Google's engineering culture treated every problem as a data problem. This was not just a management philosophy; it was incompatible with the judgment-and-relationship culture of media and advertising incumbents.
