Because ads impose costs on consumers – and that’s why consumers are busy tuning them out, and tuning each other in. And that’s how Google invests in consumers: Google is foregoing revenues so consumers aren’t forced to view costly ads on its homepage. From an economic point of view, in fact, the amount of revenue Google foregoes is the amount Google is investing in consumers, every second of every day.

More simply: it’s by directly investing in consumers – instead of investing in advertising, which ends up imposing costs on consumers – that Google has built the world’s most powerful brand in less than a decade.