A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.

This is a Kshaped example that’s solid. Some SMBs can afford per keyword large spend in focused high reward arenas. The rest can’t do anything.

> Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.

For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.

I wish I knew the difference. I’ve ran or been close to tens of businesses over the last 20 years and we’ve always paid the Google tax, but I’m not sure it’s ever had a positive ROI.