Magazines aren’t involved ads in places other than their magazine. Google powers ads placed on websites that are not owned by Google. The equivalent would be something like Time being responsible for random billboards.

The OOP would be right if Google made all/most of its money from ads on Search and YouTube. They’d be a search and video company that makes its money through advertising. That’s the correct analogy to magazines.

But Google also acts as a broker selling ads to entirely unrelated websites. That’s what makes them an advertising company.

So, you think the argument of “they can’t be a doctor as they are a swimmer” is a good argument? Obviously you can be 2 things.

But even then: The problem is that it is ignorant to Google’s business model. Google is not simply hosting ads in their products as a form of revenue. Google makes 11% of it’s revenue by tracking and hosting ads on other Plattforms. The person calling google an ad company, obviously makes the point that google has a major interest in ads and tracking. 11% of your total revenue is a lot of money to have motivation for having a major interest in ads and tracking. (Btw. This is ignoring the ad revenue that they make on their own properties like YouTube. Which also benefits from the tracking of users on other site. In other words, google has even more of an interest in it then just 11%, in fact 80% of it’s revenue is ads and tracking. But I want to focus on the “what is different from a magazine” part)

In other words, you can be both. Magazines can be an ad company too. And highlighting Google’s interest in ads because 80% of their revenue is from ads and 11% from providing ads to other sites, is hardly wrong if talking about Google’s relationship with ads.