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Comment by capkutay | Hacker News Reader

How do facebook and Google make money? Selling ads in social network and search land.

Having an enormous, religiously active user base has proven time and time again to be a huge cash cow.

That was Twitter's playbook and I thought Twitter wasn't doing so well recently...I'm not saying massive amounts of users isn't valuable, but you still need to play it right.

Twitter is massively profitable. It makes billions in advertising.

(for every $1 twitter make, it spends $2, so their accounting is deep in the negative. But if they fire half the people (who are useless anyway) and stop spending money like madmen, they'll be positive, VERY POSITIVE. thanks to advertising revenues.)

Well I'm sure those are the reasons why Google pass on :)

They can't buy first and fire people afterwards. The cleansing would have dire effect on the alphabet parent company.

no need. Twitter announced it was firing ~20% of it's userbase.

Guess Google can swoop in and buy it now :)

Or they can repeat the process till they have 20% left ;)

Twitter is massively unprofitable. 12 months ending 2015-12-31: loss of over USD500MM. 3 months ending 2016-06-30: loss of USD107MM.

twitter is worth 11B and makes 2.6B/yr. The playbook works

Twitter loses over USD600MM / yr. The playbook is yet to be proven. If they were earning 2.6B / yr, news articles and market perception would be very, very different.

The fairy ad business model.

Don't know about Facebook (never been) but I keep hearing about this fabled Google Ad business and honestly, not only I can't recall the last time I even noticed one, needless to say have never even clicked on one. Some interested party wants to keep these surveillance cum social networks afloat and the fairy ad business model and overblown evaluations and VC cash is the front for funding them.

> I keep hearing about this fabled Google Ad business

The one that makes 19 billion dollars per quarter?

That's the cash flow, the hypothesized white washed flow of funds to select platforms under control of the said interested parties.

You can't use google much if you haven't noticed the top three results on your searches sometimes being tagged with the word "sponsored". Unless the reason it's showing here, is an European law thing?

They say it here in America. But uBlock blocks it :)

I've been using it since pretty much since it came out. In the early days I definitely noticed the ads on the side, but very quickly it pretty much got filtered away in my eyes along with window decorations, etc.

Google and Facebook capture user data across many dimensions, and so are able to present advertisers with highly targeted groups of prospects. I don't know if that's the case with Twitter or Snapchat. I would say that the more a site presents you with ads you have no interest in, the less likely it is that they have fine-grained profiles of their users (which is where the money is).

The way it stands, Snapchat already has more data points to tap from and richer content and interaction opportunities than traditional media (television, radio, print, OOH...), and this could be further improved in future versions. You don't need to set out to compete against Google and Facebook when the actual big fish in the market are in fact easier to position yourself against.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the actual big fish in the market. Google's Q2 16 ad revenue was $19.1B, NBC's was $2.1B, CBS's was $1.6B, and ABC's was also $1.6B.

I was thinking verticals as a whole, not individual companies. The budget for TV, print, radio and so forth tells the size of the market, the fact that there are more players in these verticals than in online search is maybe yet another reason to attack them rather than Google.

Google ads are something we only see when searching on google. They're easy to tolerate.

No one will put up with virtual ads in AR.

I'm not so sure. Even with their rudimentary pre-AR camera filters, some were pretty popular and successful [1]. The Gatorade dunk filter generated 160 million impressions and the company was very pleased [2] -- and people seemed to like it.

The filters are also interesting because they involve user choice: the ads are not unsolicited; rather, they are picked by the users. That's pretty interesting.

We've had in-game advertising in video games for a while; certain games that mimic realistic urban environments lend themselves well to this. In some settings, AR could include a density of advertising -- passive or interactive -- similar to the real world without much trouble. In fact, an AR setting devoid of any commercial presence may be unsettling on its own.

[1] https://medium.com/comms-planning/11-branded-snapchat-filter...

[2] http://digiday.com/brands/inside-gatorades-digital-ad-playbo...

> In some settings, AR could include a density of advertising -- passive or interactive -- similar to the real world without much trouble. In fact, an AR setting devoid of any commercial presence may be unsettling on its own.

I'm going to use it to block IRL advertising, not replace it.

Adblock made an April Fool's video about this!

>In some settings, AR could include a density of advertising -- passive or interactive -- similar to the real world without much trouble.

Occasionally I'll watch an NHL hockey game and on certain broadcasts I started to notice large banners on the glass behind the goals and thought to myself, "Boy, you pay for seats that close to the ice and you're looking at the back of a banner ad?"

When I noticed the ad changed during the broadcast I realized that it was a virtual projection for the TV audience[0] -- a sort of AR in its own right, since it appears so seamless that I originally thought it was part of the rink.

[0] http://www.sportvision.com/hockey/virtual-advertisements

Snap chat inserts sponsored content into your feed. The trick is the content is engaging and heavily tailored to their demographics. Lots of celeb gossip, sports news, random stuff you'd normally see in magazine articles. There's certainly a distinct, high potential business opportunity there.

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