In the wake of the dot-com bust, Google increasingly needed a way to generate revenues, yet a fee-based service risked alienating the users who were the basis of its success. Eventually it began to use the search data, along with cookies and other bits of information, to sell targeted ad space to advertisers through an increasingly automated auction system. When the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) market peaked in March 2000, Google unveiled AdWords in October 2000 and began its transformation into a revenue-generating company. The extracted data moved from being a way to improve services to becoming a way to collect advertising revenues. Today Google and Facebook remain almost entirely dependent on them: in the first quarter of 2016, 89.0 per cent of Google's and 96.6 per cent of Facebook's revenues came from advertisers.

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, loc. 52