[dartos]

I mean that if you are starting a company, as the young Google founders were back in the day, there is almost always more money in having a B2B model instead of a B2C model.

If you’re one of the biggest companies in the world, you can do whatever you want. Though I’d bet that Microsoft makes more money off of their cut from 3rd party games sold on their platform than off of the sales of their first party titles alone.

[svnt]

They ran it for three or four years floundering and if I recall tried to sell to Excite for $1M but failed before they bought Adwords and it started to work for them.

I don’t think it is some universal truth, but it was the reality of the time that people wouldn’t pay for search so they pivoted into advertising.