A significant portion of the modern digital advertisement is heavily data-driven, and those numbers are available to advertisers as well. Based on the numbers, many advertisers actually believe that Google is one of the best options available on the market. It's possible that this is not necessarily due to their modeling technology but infrastructure though.

Indeed, who are all those people giving Google $100B a year, with 20% growth YoY, to run their ads? They must all be fools to believe that Google is giving them anything of value.

Possibly? Or they think that their payments are required to be ranked fairly on Google's service and view it more as blackmail than anything else. Searching for "amazon" brings up an Ad paid for by Amazon, searching for "books for sale" brings up paid Ads for four different book sellers - if any of them stopped paying google they'd be, at best, the fourth result - and the first Ad result is for the first organic result, the next organic result is the fourth ad, the one after it a sub-page in the last result and the fourth organic result is craigslist which didn't pay for an Ad. In fact, Amazon isn't even on the first page of results except for their Ad.

Related tweet by Jason Fried about Basecamp result placement:

"When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad."

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?la...