What we can’t point to yet is what comes next? Continued growth or are we nearing a peak? Hopefully cloud can turn on profit mode soon
As long as consumers are buying stuff, companies will advertise to them. As long as Google has a captive audience and they can continue to mint keywords for advertisers to bid against, I think this flywheel continues.
Sure HN notices this first, but for sure the "regular people" are not far behind.
Still, there are no good alternatives -- yet. You can bet if Google is the new Altavista, then the new Google is just over the Horizon waiting to steal their ad revenue...