The future of streaming is ads
theverge.com
theverge.com
A bit exaggerated, no?
Out of the top 5 big tech companies (Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft) I would only describe it as the lifeblood of Meta and Alphabet. While the others also have ad revenue streams, they neither depend on it nor is it their biggest source of revenue.
They made money selling ads too, but I know that just ads on their sites pulled $11k an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If I remember correctly it was only a quarter of a billion unique visitors a month as well, back then.
And believe me when I say I see their stuff mentioned on HN at least a couple of times a week, you've used their sites.
as of yet
Pull up a screenshot of the iPad App Store home page from 2 years ago and look at it today. First thing you see is an ad.
Gambling ads are "paused" for now. [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/26/23425637/apple-pauses-ga...
Apple Maps expected to show ads this year [2]
[2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/08/21/apple-maps-could-...
yes that what rumors/speculation is. I have little doubt of it not turning out to be true.
Digital "won" because it could generate pretty dashboards to convince people that it was producing better targeting/reach/etc. than traditional spray-and-pray ads. They acted like they had a solution for "I don't know which half of my ad money is wasted."
To deliver this, we built a world of trillion-dollar middlemen, the creepy tracking experience, and opaque platforms.
So now we can answer that question, but the answer is two-fold: "the wasted part of the ad spend is the cash paying for Mark Zuckerberg's VR hobby and not actually turning into pixels on customer screens" and also "You're now wasting 70% of your ad spend, and it's a bigger total spend than when you were hand-wringing about wasting 50% of it."
A lot of the slop in the ad market is low-quality channels feeding off of bottom-feed networks, most of which would be unviable without a large, confusing ad supply chain. Nobody actively goes out to be the unskippable ad that people are accidentally clicking because a crappy mobile game launched it mid-screen in the middle of play, but that sort of garbage is bankrolling a lot of products.
I expect the bubbles will pop one day, and we'll see much more direct advertising and a major price reset. A lot of ad-driven products will fold or reposition based on more realistic valuation.