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Comment by kergonath | Hacker News Reader

> Google has Android, Google Workplace, GCP, etc.

Alphabet is more than 80% advertising: https://searchengineland.com/google-q4-2021-earnings-379735 . They are good at skewing how they are perceived but they are very close to being a one-business company. Not defending Facebook, but Google is not much better.

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Their "ads" are driven from more sectors than Facebook. Whatsapp has no ads, so it's basically FB and Insta

FB has Audience Network which extends their targeting off platform.

But yes, Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick and investment in video through YouTube has allowed them to capture the publisher and buyer side of much of the open web (and use the data to cut out competition - cf. Project Bernanke)

Audience network just took a big hit from apples privacy policy changes. Google controls the entire ecosystem for many users and most of the ecosystem for pretty much all of them, so they can never get blindsided like Facebook did.

I saw this claim elsewhere in this thread as well, but I didn't really get it. Google is going be affected equally by iOS changes. Google does control the Android/Chrome ecosystem, but I don't see how Google could make any changes there that hurt Facebook because of antitrust concerns.

Facebook says the iOS changes are going to cost them $10 billion this year. Google blew past earnings and issued strong guidance last quarter.

That's actually a spectacular improvement (82% ad revenue)... it was more like 98% not that many years ago. So while it's taking them years, they are slowly diversifying.

Yeah the figure I had in mind before looking for sources was 95%, which might have been a couple of years ago. There still is a chasm between how they make money and how people think they do. Probably because ads and tracking are more or less background noise when you browse the Internet, and things like Android are more sexy and concrete. But Android clearly is just a way to drive ads, not a separate business.

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