Bill Gross wants to save media ... with AI
I remember when Bill Gross launched GoTo.com back in early 1998. The idea seemed nuts. Search was broken. Spammers had polluted results. In many cases they’d become just a list of who’d paid the most for placement. Google wasn’t even a company until the end of that year. But GoTo’s solution - to just be up front about spammers’ deception - seemed completely wrong. “Pay for search? That’s making it worse, not better,” most in Silicon Valley said. A chunk of the audience actually hissed at Gross when he was done unveiling GoTo at the 1998 Ted Conference in Monterey, he said..
Today we know what happened instead: The idea behind GoTo changed the world. GoTo was the first meaningful pay-for-performance search ad company - and half of what became Google Adwords four years later. When Google married pay-for-performance ads with its superior search results, it revolutionized the modern internet. No one thought you could make a dime with traditional search until Google did this. Google today is worth more than $2 trillion because it did.
Gross should have made a zillion dollars from this, but as he’ll tell you himself, he screwed it up. The idea seemed so obvious to him that he didn’t immediately think to patent it. And by the time he’d realized his mistake, during his first conversations with investment bankers wanting to take GoTo public, pay-per-click, as it came to be known, was unpatentable.
