This new pricing discipline established an ever-escalating incentive to increase behavioral surplus in order to continuously upgrade the effectiveness of predictions. Better predictions lead directly to more click-throughs and thus to revenue. Google learned new ways to conduct automated auctions for ad targeting that allowed the new invention to scale quickly, accommodating hundreds of thousands of advertisers and billions (later it would be trillions) of auctions simultaneously. Google's unique auction methods and capabilities earned a great deal of attention, which distracted observers from reflecting on exactly what was being auctioned: derivatives of behavioral surplus. Click-through metrics institutionalized "customer" demand for these prediction products and thus established the central importance of economies of scale in surplus supply operations. Surplus capture would have to become automatic and ubiquitous if the new logic was to succeed, as measured by the successful trading of behavioral futures.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 259