Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics,” wrote Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired. “It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising—it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.” Newspapers and other traditional media have complained from time to time about the arrogation of their content, but it is by absorbing the world’s advertising that Google has become their most destructive competitor.
