Their real mistake was not pushing to own the entire vertical stack, building unassailable moats like Google and Apple. Oculus is that bet, and other companies like Valve are pursuing similar strategies.
That's hardly "epic".
And the NASDAQ composite is down 13% in the same time frame.
why write something in bad faith?
You said "past few months" and so I quickly pulled up a 3 month history which is a dropdown option in the UI I was looking at. I replied with what I saw.
and no competitors outperform them, or advertising paradigm shift occurs?
I don't understand how people can make this statement and not immediately realize their is something deeply, deeply wrong about this situation.
Ads derive their value from the product being sold, the fact that ads themselves have become the economic underpinning of the entire internet, rather than actual things being sold, should tell you there is a problem.
People will not pay a penny for the vast majority of the internet, whether they be social networks or just plain websites. They won't donate either or do "micro transactions", not at the scale in which ads currently deliver revenue.
So for the vast majority of the internet, no ads = no money. And it ends right there, hobbyist bloggers aside.
Ads are here to stay. At best they may do less tracking in the future, but they remain.
Another unpopular thought...in a fully online, digitized society, how are companies supposed to advertise their existence or their products if there's no ads?
Not my problem, many would say. Well, it is your problem. Because you probably work at a company and they sell things.
Ads artificially increase the price of a product or service, because the cost of advertising is embedded in the price of what's sold; you're paying more money to be manipulated to buy something.
There are other externalized costs that aren't calculated, e.g. what's the cost to society on top of the "$10"/day?
What if ads also make us sicker, make poorer decisions, wasteful decisions - perhaps as simple as buying lower quality products because they have a higher profit margin and so it's the product you're exposed to, and then because we're sicker we spend more money on health?
There's not much conversation about all of this. I think the natural mechanisms of how information propagated via word of mouth before communications became what they are, how we are able to bypass those natural mechanisms, has some very negative impacts on society, e.g. buying products/services from people that didn't earn or deserve the attention, instead able to buy and manipulate you with cheap-shallow ads; what would the world look like today if this wasn't the case, what would your buying patterns be, what type of person would be amassing profits from the different buying patterns that would exist if there weren't ads, and what would the cascading consequences of that be?
I have a similar question to "what customer will still load ads". And the answer is probably anyone still using Google Chrome after they upgrade the manifest version to v4 and finally kill adblocking.
They’re past as much as selling is past.
Now, is their ads business strong enough to survive in more privacy aware world? That’s a different story.