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This is an annoying meme. Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters? People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.
If that was how they made most of their money, yes.
eg: http://www.businessinsider.com/movie-concessions-drive-amc-e...
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If that was how they made most of their money, yes.
So is McDonalds a drink company? It makes most of its money from drinks... The way a company makes its money is only weakly correlated to the service it offers to users. Think about it: if McDonalds stopped selling food, it would not have any customers. If Google stopped offering search, it would not have any users.
I don't see the McDonald's reference as the same, drinks are part of their food product. Ads are not a integrated part of search (google did not start out having ads).
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>Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. It doesn't necessarily mean that. It's more common to associate "X" with their business competency . If we always insist on X to be only defined by revenue, we then get the following type of soundbites that we pat ourselves on the back for: - McDonalds is actually a real estate company and not a hamburger company because they make more money fro…
- McDonalds is a real estate company - General Electric is really a bank - Harvard University is really a hedge fund - Lebron James is actually an advertising spokesperson Are the twisted examples above really how we categorize companies/celebrities? Maybe that's not so twisted. Maybe they are how we should really categorize the above, and the common perception is just marketing/how they made their mark initially.
It makes no sense to categorize McDonalds as a real estate company because its cost structure, hiring policies, marketing efforts, and everything else about the company in no way reflect the components of a traditional marketing company.
If "LeBron James" was a publicly traded company and you categorized him as an advertising spokesperson, would you then take him out of the gym and have him spend 4 years pursing an MBA?
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This is an annoying meme. Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters? People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.
If that was how they made most of their money, yes.
Yup don't say "Taylor Swift is in the online concert tickets business", she is in the music business.
McDonald's not in the hamburgers-and-cokes business, its in the fast food business.
Just because it's the way they make money it doesn't mean is the most appropriate classification.
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Recently I searched Amazon to read reviews of a book I bought on Kindle a few years ago. Now every website with Amazon affiliate advertising is showing me ads for that book. Considering that Amazon could have run a simple account search to determine that I am definitely not interested in seeing ads for a product that I already own, I think that the AI-targeting ad revolution is a while off yet. That is unrelated to G…
I have the same experience. On my machine, only Safari is "vanilla" - other browsers have various levels of ad/js blocking. So the only time I see ads is in Safari. I can't believe they're still feeding me Newegg ads for components that I already own and have bought from Newegg . I understand that's not as trivial a problem as it sounds, but I can't help but think companies are overpaying for ads.
The deal is those ads show up when the ad space is the cheapest. It's known as remant inventory. So the retargeters can pick it up for very cheap.
The deal is the companies KNOW that some people see ads for things they already bought. But some people are seeing ads for things like only considered, and bombarding them with ads does affect behavior. The question is, is the increase in revenue worth the cost of retargeting.
The answer is very much yes. Even as it annoys people who already bought it, which doesn't even factor since they already made the revenue from your purchase.
As an American I think it's pretty badass that something like 8 or 9 of the top 10 most valuable companies in the world are all American. I'm not sure if that means we're doing something right, but it's still pretty cool for a moment.
All 10 of the 10 most valuable publicly traded companies are American (multinational) companies. #11 is Chinese and #20 is Swiss [1]. (Not that the largest 4 companies are tech companies, so that explains part of it...) [1] http://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap....
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Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.
This is an annoying meme. Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters? People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.
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If that was how they made most of their money, yes.
So is McDonalds a drink company? It makes most of its money from drinks... The way a company makes its money is only weakly correlated to the service it offers to users. Think about it: if McDonalds stopped selling food, it would not have any customers. If Google stopped offering search, it would not have any users.
But yeah, I agree with you. Businesses are more complex than individual touchpoints.
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So is McDonalds a drink company? It makes most of its money from drinks... The way a company makes its money is only weakly correlated to the service it offers to users. Think about it: if McDonalds stopped selling food, it would not have any customers. If Google stopped offering search, it would not have any users.
Google is a ad company who uses search to attract customers. I don't see the McDonald's reference as the same, drinks are part of their food product. Ads are not a integrated part of search (google did not start out having ads).
If someone asks, which of the 2 answers would be more helpful to them?
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I absolutely agree that comparing Google and apple is silly. But calling Google an "artificial intelligence" company is just feeding another buzzword into the fire.
Google's flagship product is a box that you can type words into, and get relevant texts/references/facts in response. It seems like a textbook example of AI.
OK, to be fair, search is still very important too (in fact the most important content provider for their ad business). So call them a "search and advertising company".
They use machine learning and are actively researching it, but that's true of a lot of companies. Is IBM an AI company?