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Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

I am honestly amazed that people do not seem to realize that all the "tech" companies that are advertising vendors are in deep trouble right now.

The numbers are not good and some seriously hard decisions are going to be coming up.

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Do you have some sources/data to reference? I have read articles discussing this superficially, e.g. companies reducing ad and marketing expenditure, therefore affecting ad serving platforms.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/technology/coronavirus-go...

An NYT article about it.

Although I am not sure I agree with the deep trouble assessment. At least for the first quarter, the analysts were too fearful.

https://www.thedrum.com/news/2020/04/29/alphabet-posts-sudde...

There is a counter argument that online ads is the way to drive traffic to online stores that are currently replacing brick and mortar outlets during quarantine.

Ads on youtube seem to have recently gotten much more annoying, to the extent that the last few times I've tried to watch a 20-30 minute video I get sick of it inside of 5 minutes and quit.

That would be my intuition too. And I don't really have any source to back it up, but to me ads and marketing firms are gonna be hit hard indirectly.

My company is directly impacted by all the shutdowns because we sell things, in stores, to people. So yeah, times are tough. But ads and marketing budget is the first thing that got slashed, and I imagine that it happens everywhere.

A buddy of mine works at a marketing company. He kept telling me that they were fine, people staying home didn't affect their business, etc etc. But a week ago he told me that now they were feeling the ripple effect very hard.

Thank god they all have massive amounts of cash to eat through before they have to lay off workers.

And then 130,000 contractors to eat through before getting to the 100,000 employees.

uber has a lot of cash and yet still laid off.

i think it’s in the shareholders interest to lay-off instead of eating into cash reserves

Of course. You hired those employees presumably in the interest of shareholders, not as a humanitarian deed.

What do the shareholders do?

Sorry, I thought my sarcasm was clear.

Are you implying that Google is a "tech" company that is actually an advertising vendor? I understand where they derive most of their revenue from but given their contributions to everything from the linux kernel, to networking, containers, etc. I think it's a little unfair to put quotes around "tech" in their case.

In the sense of where does the money come from, google is absolutely an advertising company.

You can be an advertising company and also make some contributions to tech at the same time

Sure, if a "tech company" can only make money by selling in-house developed technology, and not by packaging in-house developed technology into other products, then I concede the point. There are fairly few "tech companies" by that definition.

I still think your rephrasing of the characterization is somewhat unfair to Google. They created their main business by developing the technology to enable it, and they have gone way beyond "some contributions" to software and systems technology in support of it.

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