TITANS COLUMN: OMID KORDESTANI
I interviewed Omid a couple of months ago for my B2.0 column, here it is in full. — TITANS OF TECH — The Wizard of Ads — Google's Omid Kordestani conjured a formula that took its sales to $3 billion. Now he's rethinking the world of advertising again.
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2005, Omid Kordestani was the executive behind the sales formula that scaled Google from a promising search engine into a $3 billion advertising business — and he was already signaling that the model would need reinvention. This interview captures Google at the moment its ad machine became the industry template. The decades since have proven how durable that template is: publishers spent years searching for alternatives, with [[a:824532|Evan Williams arguing Medium's key ad metric should be time spent on page rather than views]], while builders of new ad businesses keep returning to the questions Kordestani raised, as Gokul Rajaram discusses on building ad businesses amid AI-driven product change.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and agencies get a rare first-hand account of the direct-sales formula behind Google's $3 billion revenue run rate — the playbook competitors must now study or match.
- Kordestani himself signals publicly that Google's ad model isn't finished, framing reinvention (not optimization) as the standing mandate for the company's core business.
Second-order effects
- Rivals are forced to respond to Google's self-serve, auction-based ad system rather than legacy display sales, accelerating the shift of ad dollars toward performance-based channels and squeezing traditional media sellers.
- Publishers and platforms begin questioning whether impressions and clicks are the right currency at all — the debate that later surfaces around engagement-time metrics instead of raw traffic.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, online advertising becomes a continuously re-engineered system — each generation (search auctions, social targeting, and eventually AI-mediated formats) forcing a new 'formula' and resetting which companies capture the value.
- The structural tension Kordestani names persists: whoever controls both intent data and the sales model sets pricing power for the whole ecosystem, an issue regulators and advertisers still grapple with.
The trend: Advertising keeps being rebuilt around whatever mechanism best converts user intent into measurable revenue, with each platform that cracks the formula becoming the next incumbent to be disrupted.