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it. It created a new way for advertisers to reach highly targeted audiences just as they search for and read relevant content. Even more disrupting to old media ways, Google didn’t charge for eyeballs—that is, the size of the audience—but for clicks—that is, action. Advertisers could measure the return on their investment instead of talking to faceless masses that may or may not have been listening. More disruption: Google didn’t set ad rates as old media did; it let the marketplace set the price of keywords in auctions. Because Google benefits as more ads are clicked on, it is in Google’s interest to continue to improve its targeting and effectiveness. That improves both advertisers’ efficiency and Google’s bottom line. This virtuous circle of virtuous circles is how Google built its empire around the fall of the mass and the rise of the niche.

You, too, must learn how to make the transition from mass to niche and how to exploit it. If you’re still selling products to the masses, you’re going to find it harder. If you’re making one-size-fits-all products, realize they don’t fit everyone. Customers will tell you what they want instead. In the next section of the book, we will examine scenarios for adapting and capitalizing on the move from mass: how automakers should let us help them make cars, how retailers can help us find unique goods, how universities should help us craft our educations. The shift from mass is really a shift of power from top to bottom, center to edge, them to us.

The mass market is dead. It committed suicide. Google just handed it the gun.

Google commodifies everything

In the earliest days of the web, I watched focus groups where users thought there was this amazing new company that had acquired all the content you could imagine about every subject possible, as if from the merger of a library, a newspaper, a magazine, and a weather service. That company was Netscape. It merely made the first commercial browser that took readers to those other companies’ sites. But Netscape got the credit.

Today, that amazing brand is Google. People go online looking for something, find the answer, and often don’t know where they found it. Google found it. They’re savvier today and know that Google doesn’t own all the content it links to. But that doesn’t matter, so long as they find what they want—and Google is damned good at that. That’s great for users but bad for brands. Here you work your buns off creating a brand online; you build technology and staff to maintain your site; you spend a fortune on marketing and search-engine optimization to get people to find it; you tell advertisers how many users come to your page and like your brand. But in the end, huge numbers of users don’t recall coming to your site and don’t credit your brand. When I worked on newspaper sites, we knew we had more users than the research said. The problem was, when users were asked where they had seen a piece of information that could have come only from us, they often couldn’t remember. Google found it for them. Google diluted our brands.

Google has turned commodification into a business strategy. Content is commodified: Google makes it just about as easy for you to find what I’ve written on a topic as what Newsweek has written. Once was, brands organized information but now Google does. Media are commodified: Google places marketers’ ads on sites without telling them where the ads will appear. It places those ads not as an ad agency would—on the basis of the audience size, demographics, trust, or value of a media brand—but on the coincidence of words on a page. The value of the ad depends only on how many people click on it. Thus the media brand behind the content where the ad appears becomes less critical and less valuable. Even the audience is commodified: There’s little that distinguishes one of us from another—not age, income, gender, education, interest, all the things advertisers historically paid for. Everybody’s like everybody else. We’re just users. We might as well be pork bellies. And advertisers are commodified: