We don't know that either. For example, the old-world analogues of Google are the classified ad section and the yellow pages. Both of them cater to people who know what they're looking for, and so have excellent focus. Yet I'd imagine that many, many times more money gets spent on TV commercials than on classified ads. It seems like "creating demand" is a much bigger market than "meeting demand", and if FaceBook can succeed at the former, it could be many times bigger than Google.
>It seems like "creating demand" is a much bigger market than "meeting demand"
I think that it's just easier to spend money on creating demand - Maroon's whole point about Google being the theoretical limit for targeting is that it's a hard task. Most people spend much more free time consuming media than discovering things, and it's the search part of discovery that is applicable for targeting.
Hmm, I wonder if you TiVo or the cable companies could mine your channel-surfing behavior to improve ad targeting (but that would require customized TV feeds instead of broadcast, yada, yada, yada). That would be interesting to identify other "discovery" activities that people do.
I'm not trying to defend his essay, merely stating that it argues something different from what's in the title.
That said, I'd caution against using your imagination to assess ad spending. Ask the nearest small businessperson what they spend on yellow-pages listing.
