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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see how much of that revenue came at Google's expense.

Google is all about searching for results and Facebook is all about demography and thus brands.

So Facebook is taking a lot of advertising budget to establish brands that used to be for print and television.

Simple example: Diapers. By the time you have a baby, Facebook knows that you as a couple are expecting and you will see ads establishing relevant brands. You would never see those ads on Google, because at that time you're not searching for them. This used to be the business of television advertising. So you know the brand Pampers long before you ever think of buying a pack of them.

You are correct, though it's worth noting that advertising spend as a % of (American) GDP has been constant for a long, long time [0]. FB and Google are probably still competing for money that was previously spent on TV/Radio/Periodicals, but still, everyone's competing for a slice of the same pie.

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...

I'll give another perspective: In my industry at least, Google has become incredibly expensive due to a few unicorns spending ridiculous amounts of money just to put competitors out of the game (because they have the money for that, even if it doesn't make sense from a unit economics point of view, and Google is cool with it). By contrast, Facebook remains very effective for the same kind of goals, at least for the moment. I get the feeling this isn't unique to my industry so yeah, I'd venture to say there is a lot money shifting platforms.

That's a contradiction. If some companies are "spending ridiculous amounts of money" on Google, that's evidence of increased revenue for Google. It's not hard to believe that both Google and Facebook are growing.

Can you elaborate on why you think Google wouldn't know before FB?

Many (most?) people don't go posting anything about pregnancy before for ~3 months traditionally, and odds are you are going to be searching for symptoms when you first notice something is wrong health-wise.

When a doctor or test confirms you are pregnant, I'd be willing to bet that users are immediately pulling up their favorite search engine to figure out next steps vs. blabbing about it to their BFFs on FB.

Now, if you are basing it purely off of carpet bombing people targeting off of demographics, yes, FB probably has more solid data there as it is self-reported and not inferred. But you sure as heck won't get self-reported pregnancy info earlier than Google will know you are interested in it.

If anything, I'd argue Amazon would have that data in a similar timeframe if people start looking up pregnancy books.

This also entirely discounts the notion that there is 3rd party data sets at play which both Google and FB leverage to enrich their data.

All of this is not to say your point on the brand advertising is incorrect--I actually agree with that as the "feed" has become the new television. But definitely do not agree on the specific example cited.

The odds are very good that people start discussing things like pregnancy in Messenger at the same time they start googling symptoms. Public posts aren't all FB has available.

That's actually a great point that I forgot about. It is scary to think about how they are mining personal conversations like that, particularly about something so sensitive.

Could easily lead to a situation like when Target outed a girl as pregnant to her father [1].

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

The biggest advertising agency holding WPP spent $1 billion with Facebook and $4 billion with Google in 2015 [1]. Both figures are up compared to 2014, by 56% on FB and by 38% on Google, so the growth of advertising budgets on Facebook was faster, but Google still dominated.

What's impressive is that WPP alone brings in around 5-6% of both internet giants revenue. I wonder how the few multinational advertising giants (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis etc) compare to a long tail of local agencies and individual advertisers.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/wpp-google-and-facebook-spend...

I realize both are competing for ad dollars and can be called competitors for that fact [1], but my own use of them really doesn't overlap. I use FB for interacting with friends and family, I use Google for interacting with the rest of the web. FB's search is not optimal and Google+ is well... it's not something my parents or my kids are going to use. There's not much overlap in my video viewing habits either. I don't sit down to watch a video on FB. How would I even find something to watch on FB? YouTube search is incredibly impressive and satisfying. I'm sure FB and Google would like to take more of each other's markets, but I don't see how they would do that. I may be projecting, but I think most people are satisfied with two great services and don't feel the need for one that does it all.

[1] http://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/google-vs-facebook-3-things...

The impact would be lower CPCs for mobile ads. People moving their ad spend over to Facebook from Google. One of the interesting myths people used to believe in was that adding a new advertising platform would add more ad dollars to the digital economy. However, the pool of ad dollars is finite, the people who spend them have fixed budgets so when they shift them to new inventory they take them away from somewhere else. And the way that is reflected in Google's number is their auction system for ads gets lower bids as fewer people are competing for various spots.

Thanks, I figured I was missing something since I don't know much about the ad business other than what I read about in regards to the impact of ad blocking and efforts such as Brendan Eich's company to mitigate the problem.

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