This is a very small niche meme, and most of the "money printers go brrr" stuff is meme-ing post March 2020, when people didn't understand why the markets didn't go down.
Certainly, it's a reference to central banking, I doubt it is to this meme.
When Bernanke made the speech in 2016 where he invented the idea of a helicopter dropping money it was pretty much instantly a meme... everyone in the finance community knew about it because of how ridicules it sounded
> The name "helicopter money" was first coined by Milton Friedman in 1969, when he wrote a parable of dropping money from a helicopter to illustrate the effects of monetary expansion. The concept was revived by economists as a monetary policy proposal in the early 2000s following Japan's Lost Decade. In November 2002, Ben Bernanke, then Federal Reserve Board governor, and later chairman suggested that helicopter money could always be used to prevent deflation.
Several years ago, a person deep inside GOOG told me that the company had a secret knob that they could turn to increase revenues. He didn't go into details, but I concluded that it had something to do with the ad auction pricing. This could be that "dial".
Perhaps it's just a reference to Fed policy snoozery, but the helicopter connection seems like a better fit to me.
I'm sure they could adjust the auction pricing, but they could also increase the size of ads (either more ads, or bigger text) on the search result page (or other high traffic pages). Many moons ago, at Yahoo Travel we had a few requests to boost revenue near the end of the quarter; adding a third text ad works, but you don't really want to keep it because it reduces the utility of the page.
It is however very suspicious knob if most of the spending is automated.
To attempt an anology, consider if all phone calls where charged by the minute and there is a knob to adjust the pricing.
One cal argue it's a reasonable tool to have.
You can turn the knob up to "print money". Or you can turn it up to survive in a time when number of phone calls goes significantly down and you need to cover the fixed expenses.
If the price is too low you are leaving money on the table. If the price is too high users will see the costs surpassing the benefits and move to other products. Why not take all the money the market will bear?
Certainly, it's a reference to central banking, I doubt it is to this meme.