Advertising is a bubble. If that’s a true statement, Google is a bubble too. And if that’s true, many of the goods we take for granted on the Web are at risk. Let’s run down some evidence ...
Google has more than a million servers ... Google’s data centers are already public utilities on the scale of coal-fired power plants ...
Think of advertising as oil and Google as one big emirate. What happens when the oil runs out? ...
The free rides won’t go on forever. There are better ways than advertising for demand and supply to find each other (including search, which is free), and more will be found. Google will be in the middle of that discovery process, no doubt. But it’s an open question whether Google will make the same kind of money in a post-advertising marketplace. I’m betting they won’t.