Speaking at iTV Con, a conference on internet television, in July 2007, Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, argued that the fragmentation of the television audience was good news for advertising rather than bad. With more specialised channels, he said, advertising could be matched much more closely to the people watching: fewer ads, better targeted, reaching more of the intended audience, and more money made because relevance went up. Viewers, on his account, had reached the point where they expected an ad to be relevant and were more likely to watch one that was.
Established networks at the time were still working out what a fragmenting audience, YouTube and digital video recorders meant for them. Reading Dureau’s comments alongside Google’s recent moves into video, the blog Last100 suggested the company was quietly assembling the same ecosystem around television that it already had around the web — search, targeting and an advertising marketplace — and that television executives should be sleeping badly.
The specific product bets of 2007 came to little. The argument about relevance did not: ad-supported streaming services now sell advertisers close to what Dureau described, and the fragmented audience is the thing being sold rather than the problem.